Nuff Said

h/t: Liveaction.org

Weigel - Erosion of Religious Freedom

George Weigel:

Religious freedom, rightly understood, cannot be reduced to freedom of worship. Religious freedom includes the right to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square and to conduct the affairs of one’s religious community without undue interference from the state. If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship, then, as noted above, there is “religious freedom” in Saudi Arabia, where Bibles and evangelism are forbidden but expatriate Filipino laborers can attend Mass in the U.S. embassy compound in Riyadh.

In its glory years, the State Department’s human rights bureau was a stalwart friend of those brave men and women in communist countries who were asserting, in addition to their right to worship, their rights as believers to be fully participant in society. That noble legacy should cause the present guardians of U.S. human rights policy to think very carefully about the path they seem to be taking in this field.

Read more here.

True North

Mentor, friend, and stout fellow, Gil Bailie posts on expecting a grandchild, being a former - or is it present? - Eagle Scout, and weathering cultural storms in Be Prepared … for random coincidence …

He refers in his post to Joe Carter's piece at First Things, The Most Influential Conservative Book Ever Produced in America, which shows how my Shire-produced hobbit mind works. It never occurred to me to label the Boy Scout Manual "conservative". Or perhaps, if anyone was so benighted as to see the Manual in Marxist terms, it was so much the worse for him/her. To libel the BSA was tantamount to libeling the Junior Woodchucks, or being so daft as to assume magnetic north is true north.

Of course, times have changed: up IS down, bad IS good, and the center does not hold.

The worshipers of mayhem and chaos, those possessed by the spirit of the age, feel a quaint need to kick over any restraints and mores that still exist. For them, following a path of being trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent is clearly pathology.

But for me and my house, we will keep lamps and oil ready during snowstorms, help the old lady shovel out, have the whetstone handy, and a few extra tins in the pantry. Especially when more snow is expected.

Send me a copy of the Metrosexuals' Manual when it comes out. I'm sure it will be good for a few laughs.

War with Evil

Our man in the field, Gil Bailie, at the March for Life last Friday himself, posts an interview with Rep. Smith of New Jersey on the fact that the Obama Administration is pumping not millions, but billions of dollars here and abroad into culture of death / pro-abortion agencies.

In the same way the March was ignored or misrepresented, the proposed Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad slated to run during the Super Bowl is being trashed too.

René Girard says the second great trick of Satan is convincing people that he does exist, I know. But it is difficult not to agree with Peter Kreeft in this war with evil.

That said, Father John Zuhlsdorf shares a ray of hope-filled light.

Pius XII - Saint Material

In the ongoing sparring over the World War II record of Pope Pius XII, who are you going to believe? Around here, the Mass'keteers are pope's men all, to answer the question. Besides, the spirit of the age will always be a "master of suspicion" toward truth, goodness, and beauty. Man up, face facts, and fight the good fight.

Every Soul a Fiefdom

Any film depiction, any fictional narrative, any conjectures about the days and years of medieval Europe that do not include regular and normal reference to the Catholic faith of the people - from yeoman to monarch - is baseless balderdash and rearward projection of our threadbare, faithless, secularist era.

To believe that men were as functionally atheist and pragmatically unthinking of the will of God then as they are today, I say again, is not only poppycock but slanderous.

Did they use phrases fervently or as mere catch-phrases, going along to get along? Well, with how much fervor do you always - always - pray the Our Father ('Lord's Prayer')? Exactly.

But medieval Europe was drenched with the language of the Church, the language of the Faith; which were one and the same thing. As you have noticed, this is not the case today; yes, sure, in pockets, but not in the mainstream media, not in politics, not in general. It is the exception to the rule. The reformation, so-called, arrogated the arbitration of revealed knowledge from the true keeper of the deposit of faith. Now, every one from the storefront preacher to NPR tries to define the terms of discourse for faith and morals.

In our sad times, most persons are bereft of the wholesomeness of the Catholic faith (I'm sorry, but all other christianities are downstream) their birthright, scorned and rejected out of ignorance, assumption, prejudice, or political expediency. Therefore, those who still are graced enough to join in full communion with Mother Church see the truth of everyones' personal responsibility:

The greater number of men have by far too high an opinion of their own worth and too great a confidence in their own strength, but of their own vocation, of the end to which they are destined, they have, in general, a sense far too low. They do not believe in it; they look upon their calling and destiny and themselves as from the point whence they survey the whole world. But in this they are guilty of a great error and of a great injustice; for every man is a separate world in himself, a true micro-cosmus in the eyes of God and in the plan of the whole creation. Every man has a separate calling and an end peculiar to himself.

As in the warfare of the Middle Ages, when each man was regarded as a power, so in the spiritual combats of all times, Chivalry requires every man to believe that he is personally called upon to pronounce between error and truth, injustice an justice, vice and virtue.

- Maxims of Christian Chivalry

May you know, gentle reader, that your heart, your soul, your conscience - all is a fiefdom and unity that will be judged by the Triune God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no hiding behind the spirit of our age. Each one of us will be judged. How well are you fighting the good fight in your realm?

The League of Bearded Catholics

With the apparent demise of The Blue Boar - it's been a dead stick since the catastrophic events surrounding the notorious Four Men's Feast - I lift a tankard to a new star in the night sky. Tim Jones of Old World Swine puts forth what looks to be a fine new effort. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The League of Bearded Catholics.

T(olkien)he L(ewis)eague of B(elloc)earded C(hesterton)atholics stretches the imagination somewhat since only one of the four actually grew a beard for any sustained amount of time (Belloc), but all four had beards to shave, and Lewis never was a Catholic. (NB: Fr Walter Hooper, Lewis's executive secretary is quoted in Joseph Pearce's book, C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, to the effect that if Lewis were still alive, in his opinion, Lewis would be a Catholic today with the suspect faith and morality in the Anglican communion.)

Check it out.

Girard, Conversion, Film, Culture

From Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes,

When, a semester or two ago, my department chair asked me to teach the local version of the nowadays-pervasive “popular culture” course, I consented with some mild misgivings and, as I like to do, took a mostly historical approach to course-content. I have no investment in contemporary popular culture, the wretchedness of it striking me as consummate. My students, for their part, being morbidly, continuously immersed in contemporary popular culture, require no one, really, to acquaint them with it. At least they require no one to tutor them in it directly, since it regrettably is their ubiquitous and hortatory guide and cue-giver for all facets of life. But one might apprise them about the insipidity of existing mass-entertainment indirectly by putting it in contrast with the popular entertainments of the past, including the classic films that most of them have never seen and, more importantly, would never seek out on their own. One film that I showed to students was the Errol Flynn vehicle The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz. Another one, not so well known as Robin Hood, was the Roger Livesey/Wendy Hiller vehicle I Know Where I’m Going (1945), directed by Michael Powell (1905-1990).

In respect of The Adventures of Robin Hood, I have remarked in an article [here], for MediaHope, how one of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’s superbly mounted medieval epic is that, at its heart, the film tells a moving conversion story – actually a pair of them, Marian’s and Robin’s, that the screenwriters skillfully intertwine. In the same article I reiterated critic René Girard’s argument that all effective narrative turns on plausible conversion and that reading itself is a type of conversion experience. If Girard’s point were valid for written narrative then why would it not likewise be so for film? Like Curtiz’s Robin Hood, Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going tells a conversion story, brilliantly, and uses it to make a profound filmic critique of the crassness that pervades modern life. I should add that in neither instance is it a case of religious conversion but rather of something subtler..More>>

Once More into the Breach

Anne Barbeau Gardiner, a Contributing Editor of the NOR, is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She reviews Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany. By Cornelie Usborne. Berghahn Books. 284 pages.

...one might conclude that the road to Hitler was paved with abortions. The Weimar Republic was a society committing suicide in slow motion. It could neither stop the killing of its unborn children nor control the degrading hedonism that accompanied this practice. In retrospect, one might call Weimar a very weak form of the culture of death, a preview of what now prevails in much of the Western world. It was so weak it easily caved in when confronted with a fiercer form of that same culture. For even under the Nazis the slaughter of the unborn continued. Hitler was gung-ho for eugenic abortion, and while he made abortion virtually inaccessible for German women of supposedly superior "stock," he legalized it and sometimes made it (along with sterilization) compulsory for women of what he called "inferior races." Thus did an enervated society cave in to a mad tyrant. Thus did Weimar's "cultures of abortion" usher in the Holocaust. Perhaps we should take warning..More>>

In The Killing Fields, there is a moment when Dith Pran, the trusty wingman of Sydney Schanberg, having escaped his captors stands dumbfounded, up to his ankles in decaying human flesh and bones: the mad, murderous violence of the Khmer Rouge.

In the same way, in the sane lucidity proffered by faith and reason of Mother Church, one comes to a moment of standing dumbfounded by the sheer magnitude of the abortuarial madness of today's global "civilization". It makes one want to throw in the towel, almost. And it certainly makes sense of stories like this.

But having faced my mortality (and yours), as well as the hope for the future of many young parents, one needs to sally forth - once more into the breach, as young King Hal admonished.

After all Domine, ad quen ibimus?

Slaying the Negativity of the MSM - BXVI

Well, I was hoping Aramis might take up the baton and write for the 2,000th post here at the 4M's. But Mark Shea linked to an offering from the Holy Father that I can't resist, via NCRegister:

On the feast of the Immaculate Conception yesterday, the Holy Father had some stern words on the role of the mass media in our everyday lives in this information age:

“Every day, in the newspapers, television and radio, evil is told to us, said again, amplified, so that we get used to the most horrible things and become desensitized,” Pope Benedict XVI said at the Spanish Steps in Rome. “In a certain way, it poisons us, because the negative is never fully cleansed out of our system but accumulates day after day. The heart hardens, and thoughts become gloomy. For this reason, the city needs Mary, whose presence speaks of God, reminds us of grace’s victory over sin, and makes us hope even in the humanly most difficult situations.”

The Pope also spoke about the sensationalism of mass-media news and the undignified way the individuals involved are often treated: “They make it to the front page of newspapers or the top of TV newscast — they are exploited until the end, for as long as the news and the images are newsworthy. Few can resist such a perverse mechanism. The city first hides, then exposes them to public scrutiny, without pity or with false pity. Everyone would like to be accepted as a person and considered as something sacred, because each human story is a sacred story that deserves the utmost of respect.” More here.

For the uninitiate, the Holy Father is decrying the recrudescent influence of what I will simply call paganism into the minds and hearts of even the faithful today through the MSM. (René Girard's "primitive sacred" is congruent to paganism, but must be clearly understood in an anthropological sense unlike the way "sacred" is used by Benedict XVI above.)

God guard and rest your soul during these darkening days of Advent. "Let not your hearts be troubled; neither let them be afraid," said Our Lord. And also, "In this world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world."

Full agreement with the Holy Father. Forget that at your peril.

Riding Through Advent

A strong suggestion, all loyal and doughty men-at-arms who pledge fealty to the once and future King of kings and Lord of lords: Pick thee up a copy of Michael Ward's new book, Planet Narnia.

As Ward explicates and guides one through the planetary cosmology of C. S. Lewis - based squarely in the Christian literary tradition of the Middle Ages - one is startled by the extraordinary hermeneutical power of Lewis's use of the planets to describe the taxonomy of our age. (Hint: the West in its sub-lunary sphere is caught in Saturnine doldrums - old age, death, decay. It must up and come again under the Jovial influence of arms swinging, winter-past, sins forgiven, and hearts' ease.)

One needn't muddy Lewis's interpretation with mimetic theory. You will see what I mean.

Meanwhile, ride on, readers of the Mass'keteers! Ride on through Advent to the birth of our rightful King.

Safe School Czar - NOT

The frog has boiled and needs to be flushed if our "Safe Schools Czar" isn't given the heave ho. ht: Gil Bailie @ Reflections on Faith and Culture

Benedict XVI - Relativism

VATICAN CITY, NOV. 16, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is cautioning evangelizers to be on guard against relativism, saying it infiltrates society and manipulates consciences...

The relativistic culture "enters the sanctuary of the family, infiltrates the realm of education and other realms of society and contaminates them, manipulating consciences, especially those of the young," he said.

"At the same time, however, despite these snares, the Church knows that the Holy Spirit is always acting," the Pope affirmed. "New doors, in fact, are opened to the Gospel, and spreading in the world is the longing for authentic spiritual and apostolic renewal. As in other periods of change, the pastoral priority is to show the true face of Christ, lord of history and sole redeemer of man..MORE>>

In my experience, relativism took a nasty turn during my college years. It merely took a sneer, a curl of the lip, a veiled threat to reject if I stood up for the Christian faith to cast me into the netherworld of relativism.

From a Girardian viewpoint, I feared becoming a victim and so accepted the herd's position rather than chance becoming an outcast.

The Holy Father is right. And there are huge numbers of "trip-wires" set by relativism today.

Chattering Class Folly

For the record: The Anchoress - Elizabeth Scalia - quotes Mark Shea on MSM follies, common sense worthy of G. K. Chesterton, and the balderdash of the agenda to take America into a down-leftward death spiral in this must read post.

Don't Take Every Assignment

Forgive me, but prior to my diagnosis of kidney cancer - an opportunity that my brother-in-arms, Aramis, here at the 4Ms experienced five years before me - I wrote many a thing like this. Preached them, too, I'll be bound, from a Protestant pulpit and at many a funeral. The, "Ah yes, the Christian faith says death is swallowed up in victory thanks to Saint Paul sort of thing. Hallelujah and right on, brother."

It is like a Vietnam vet friend of mine who told me once that bravery isn't being fearless in the face of live rounds. (He had buddies die, literally, on the left and on the right of him.) The guy who doesn't feel fear doesn't have the right circuitry. Bravery is feeling the fear and doing the right thing, anyway.

Anyone who denies this is a liar and the truth is not in him.

Allow me to say that it is several existential levels away from having your internal organs removed and having the joys of chemotherapy. This isn't resentment. It is merely saying that because one has a favorable reputation for writing in some areas of Catholic truth, one shouldn't assume that one's prowess and wisdom extends into all other areas; particularly when our old friend Mort comes calling up close and personal.

For the Record - Mike Flynn the Winner

In which Mike Flynn dismantles the usual atheist drivel about the "Dark Ages" and Christian triumphalism. [ht: Mark Shea]

George Isn't Sleeping Here

Cardinal George on the Last Self-Help Administration:

Just One Judge

Good news. Good thinking. Hopeful, redemptive, penitent. [ht: CMR]

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Mitsui - Sword of Sir John Conyers

Daniel Mitsui posts on Sir John Conyers who killed the Sockburn worm. Is this the legendary basis for the vvery campy 1988 thriller (based on Bram Stoker's book - same title), starring a very young Hugh Grant, Lair of the White Worm?

Captain Jack Sparrow at it again

This is in keeping to the codes, as Athos commented about Captain Jack Sparrow playing out his role in "Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy of films which does a smack-dab job of expressing what's wrong with the world." Could this picture do a better job of expressing what's wrong with the world? Make sure to go HERE to see more evidence of keeping to the codes.