Royal Viewpoint

Very interesting, acute, and incisive analysis about England from an insider if ever there was one here.

Whew

After the distinct possibility of this happening, gladly for Old London here is some good news:

In a rare setback for the would-be Islamizers of Europe, the plans for London’s “Mega-Mosque” have been abandoned. If the organizers’ goals had been realized, their huge mosque — the largest in Europe — would have dominated the skyline near the 2012 Olympics site.

Congratulations are in order for Alan Craig and his supporters, who led a massive and sustained opposition to the mosque. One may assume that the flood of negative publicity about the project was enough to give its financial backers cold feet..More>>

Cutting oneself off from the True Vine

I'm not quite certain why, but I am experiencing a new found hope regarding the Catholic faith these days, the kerfuffel at Notre Dame to the contrary notwithstanding.

Perhaps it is best thematized by Bishop Olmsted in a single sentence from his letter to President Jenkins of the University of Notre Dame regarding his invitation to I Won: It is a public act of disobedience to the Bishops of the United States.

Coming from a non-Catholic background myself, I see the long term ramifications of such a disastrous decision on the part of President Jenkins, though, apparently, he does not, being an impatient modern fellow who does not bother his head with Eric Voegelin's warning not to "immanentize the eschaton."

For, firstly, this was and continues to be the heresy par excellence of the Enlightenment project, from the French Revolution through the disasters of the 20th century, and on to the trite mayhem we are experiencing only leading edges of which were heralded in the pagan slogan, "Yes We Can."

But, secondly, Bishop Olmsted is doing more than stating the indicative. He is proclaiming a dread warning to Jenkins: Cut yourself off from the True Vine at your peril. Mainline Protestantism no less than the vast remains of Christendom are withering and becoming dry tinder ripe for the conflagration that Our Lord warns of in John 15.

Even so great an institution as the University of Notre Dame can be so short sighted if so great an institution as the Church in England can also cut herself off from the sole Church leading to the sad, dreadful affair the Anglican communion has become.

I, for one, would hate to see the Golden Dome become a relic of what it once was.

Doomed to Repeat Them

Our Lady of the Crag, Knaresborough, North Yorkshire

Here is what I consider a valuable discussion regarding similarities between the sad, so-called English "reformation" and the secularist state's arrogant and rapacious effort to silence Mother Church's voice, again.

Let me say that a good friend whose opinions I value greatly carries an animus against Fra Angelo. But this analysis is ostensibly too important to disregard for past regrettable events. The penal era in England has too much to teach us today not to examine comparisons and contrasts.

Just a Cup of Jizya Joe

The shock troops of the primitive sacred, those perpetually disgruntled "youths", took time out from their arduous street "protests". It's a requirement; especially after a grueling rally of "righteousness" against Israel's incursion into Gaza. Why not stop in at a Starbucks or two, and loot the place? Everyone's entitled to a bit of a pick-me-up, right? Ah, nothing like a justifiable breaking, entering, and stealing a cup of joe. We're sure Starbucks supports Israel. Somehow. The sons of dogs and pigs.

UPDATE: Ah, of course. Starbucks' chief executive is Howard Schultz. A Jew. Not an Israeli. An American Jew. Makes perfect sense.

Poor old England.

Bare, Ruined Choirs

The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel, Edinburgh, Effect of Moonlight [Oil on canvas, 1824] -- Louis Daguerre

That time of year thou may'st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold;
Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

(Sonnet 73)

Edwin Muir

The Good Town [h/t: Gil Bailie]

Look at it well. This was the good town once,
Known everywhere, with streets of friendly neighbours,
Street friend to street and house to house. In summer
All day the doors stood open; lock and key
Were quaint antiquities fit for museums
With gyves and rusty chains. The ivy grew
From post to post across the prison door.
The yard behind was sweet with grass and flowers.
A place where grave philosophers loved to walk.
Old Time that promises and keeps his promise
Was our sole lord indulgent and severe,
Who gave and took away with gradual hand
That never hurried, never tarried, still
Adding, subtracting. These our houses had
Long fallen into decay but that we knew
Kindness and courage can repair time's faults,
And serving him breeds patience and courtesy
In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.
There is a virtue in tranquillity
That makes all fitting, childhood and youth and age,
Each in its place.

Look well. These mounds of rubble,
And shattered piers, half-windows, broken arches
And groping arms were once inwoven in walls
Covered with saints and angels, bore the roof,
Shot up the towering spire. These gaping bridges
Once spanned the quiet river which you see
Beyond that patch of raw and angry earth
Where the new concrete houses sit and stare.
Walk with me by the river. See, the poplars
Still gather quiet gazing on the stream.
The white road winds across the small green hill
And then is lost. These few things still remain.
Some of our houses too, though not what once
Lived there and drew a strength from memory.
Our prople have been scattered, or have come
As strangers back to mingle with the strangers
Who occupy our rooms where none can find
The place he knew but settles where he can.
No family now sits at the evening table;
Father and son, mother and child are out,
A quaint and obsolete fashion. In our houses
Invaders speak their foreign tongues, informers
Appear and disappear, chance whores, officials
Humble or high, frightened, obsequious,
Sit carefully in corners. My old friends
(Friends ere these great disasters) are dispersed
In parties, armies, camps, conspiracies.
We avoid each other. If you see a man
Who smiles good-day or waves a lordly greeting
Be sure he's a policeman or a spy.
We know them by their free and candid air.

It was not time that brought these things upon us,
But these two wars that trampled on us twice,
Advancing and withdrawing, like a herd
Of clumsy-footed beasts on a stupid errand
Unknown to them or us. Pure chance, pure malice,
Or so it seemed. And when, the first war over,
The armies left and our own men came back
From every point by many a turning road,
Maimed, crippled, changed in body or in mind,
It was a sight to see the cripples come
Out on the fields. The land looked all awry,
The roads ran crooked and the light fell wrong.
Our fields were like a pack of cheating cards
Dealt out at random - all we had to play
In the bad game for the good stake, our life.
We played; a little shrewdness scraped us through.
Then came the second war, passed and repassed,
And now you see our town, the fine new prison,
The house-doors shut and barred, the frightened faces
Peeping round corners, secret police, informers,
And all afraid of all.
How did it come?

From outside, so it seemed, an endless source,
Disorder inexhaustible, strange to us,
Incomprehensible. Yet sometimes now
We ask ourselves, we the old citizens:
‘Could it have come from us? Was our peace peace?
Our goodness goodness? That old life was easy
And kind and comfortable; but evil is restless
And gives no rest to the cruel or the kind.
How could our town grow wicked in a moment?
What is the answer? Perhaps no more than this,
That once the good men swayed our lives, and those
Who copied them took a while the hue of goodness,
A passing loan; while now the bad are up,
And we, poor ordinary neutral stuff,
Not good nor bad, must ape them as we can,
In sullen rage or vile obsequiousness.
Say there's a balance between good and evil
In things, and it's so mathematical,
So finely reckoned that a jot of either,
A bare preponderance will do all you need,
Make a town good, or make it what you see.
But then, you'll say, only that jot is wanting,
That grain of virtue. No: when evil comes
All things turn adverse, and we must begin
At the beginning, heave the groaning world
Back in its place again, and clamp it there.
Then all is hard and hazardous. We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.
Look at it well. This was the good town once.’

These thoughts we have, walking among our ruins.

Edwin Muir

Economics of Hope

G. K. Chesterton reminds us in his Short History of England that "The medievals not only had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed as the central powers of the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home" (Ch. 8 - The Meaning of Merry England).

Key words in the above are "guilds" and "parishes". The reason for this is that the men who shared the same confessor in their parish church, who received the panis angelicus from the same priest, whose children were baptized at the same font were not likely to break the ways of their guild or their parish. Chesterton does not say this in so many words, but the implication is clear.

Jump to the present -- over the making of nations, the Reformation (so-called), the destruction of the monasteries and guilds out of which grew economies and laws of Europe, the establishment of capitalism and socialism -- and we see an embittered age of "secularists" (coined by atheists who didn't even want reference to a deity in their name), pillage of the pensions of workers, the lack of ownership of property by teeming millions, and a western economy teetering on the brink in subservient dhimmitude to Middle Eastern oil countries that hold a scimitar in one hand and our leash in the other.

Oh, and did I mention an urge to create two vast central governments for the whole world -- the European Union and the United States of Mex-Can-America? Thing is, however, neither will look with even a furtive glance at what the words "guilds" and "parishes" imply. Rather, they appeal in a post-Reformation fashion to the principles of unbridled greed whose increase will, they hope, raise all boats ... except those belonging to useless riff raff: the unwanted unborn, the aged, infirm, and the like.

The only hope -- the only hope -- for the west is not a forlorn clinging to "western values" sans the faith that made the West; the only hope lies in a Prodigal Son-like return. Benedict XVI is bringing just such a message of hope to the United States this week. Will any listen to him and this message?

Chivalry, the Grail, & the Round Table

A MYSTICAL MATERIALISM marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible fragments which became the germs of churches and cities.

St. Joseph carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury; and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was afterwards imitated or invented by medieval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment.

The idea of a round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this Round Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type; for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystone of an arch.

But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.

Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fact, is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians.

- G. K. Chesterton, Short History of England

Bonny Prince Harry's Return

Esmerelda Weatherwax (I just love writing that name) at The Iconoclast/New English Review on bonny Prince Harry's return. She quotes from The Times:

Prince Harry returns to England today, a hero to the Army, a changed man in the eyes of the public and a target for jihadists.

As the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff queued up to heap praise on the 23-year-old second lieutenant, protection for the Prince is to be upgraded. Al-Qaeda websites posted death threats against him yesterday after the worldwide coverage of his ten weeks in Helmand province, Afghanistan. In stark contrast, army message boards carried unanimous praise for the Prince.

The Times has seen messages posted on a password-protected al-Qaeda forum, al-Ekhlaas, calling for Prince Harry to be beheaded and a video of his murder to be sent to the Queen.

Arabic news items and photographs of the Prince on duty in Helmand were added to the jihadi sites. One posting said: “Nothing will break the heart of his grandmother but only if she loses him. My dear brothers in Allah, carry on provoking to kidnap this precious infidel.”

But it's a damned good thing the West isn't at war with radical Jihadists, isn't it? The peace of the Lord be with them. In honor of the royal lad's return, I offer the following as something those calling for his beheading can do with their fatwas:

Europe In the House of War

Spengler speaks truth not myth in this important piece, Europe in the House of War: [h/t: Brussels Journal]

By proposing to concede a permanent role to extralegal violence in the political life of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury pushed his phlegmatic countrymen over the edge. No one is better than the British at pretending that problems really aren't there, but once their spiritual leader admits to an alien source of coercion and proposes to legitimize it, they understand that a limit has been reached.

Williams' exercise in what might be termed the Higher Hypocrisy shows how deeply Europe has descended into the Dar al-Harb, or the "House of War" in the Muslim terms for all that lies outside the "house of submission", or Dar al-Islam. Europe's governments refuse to rule, that is, refuse to enforce their own laws because they fear violence on the part of Muslim immigrant communities who refuse to accept these laws. "No-go" zones proliferate that non-Muslims dare not enter. In the United Kingdom, according to evidence presented by respected journalists and public-interest organizations, Muslim community organizations, Muslim police officers and medical personnel collaborate to stop women from escaping domestic violence. Read all …

Convert England to Catholicism, Says Papal Ally

Father John Zuhlsdorf of What Does The Prayer Really Say posts on Father Aiden Nichols' new book, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England. It is so new, in fact, that it does not yet appear in the United States on Amazon or Barnes and Noble (though a pre-order from the UK Amazon is offered).

Father Z quotes extensively from this article in The Catholic Herald, which is quite lauding of Fr Nichols. I am too; his Shape of Catholic Theology (1991) was the text for my first serious graduate level course in the Catholic realm. I'm ashamed I have not yet cracked Nichols' Christendom Awake! (1999) that I bought some time ago. Have a go with this excerpt from the Herald:

Fr Aidan Nichols, the English theologian most closely associated with the thinking of Benedict XVI, has appealed for England to be “re-made” as a Catholic country.

He set out his radical and comprehensive programme for Catholic renewal in a new book entitled The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England, published by Family Publications.

In his preface he says that Catholic Christianity should be put forward “not as an occupation for individuals in their solitude but as a form for the public life of society in its overall integrity”.

He admits that the conversion of England is “an absolutely colossal agenda”, adding: “It can only be brought into being, so far as it depends on us to do so, by a coordinated strategy for recreating a full-blooded catholicity with the power to... transform a culture in all its principal dimensions.

“That is what ‘the mission to convert’ and ‘the conversion of England’ mean to me.”
His comments will be seen as an implicit criticism of the direction of the Church in England and Wales. He points to “flagship” Catholic institutions which have “suffered shipwreck through secularisation”.

Peter Hitchens on Burgeoning Islam in UK

Peter (not his atheist brother) Hitchens opines on watching Britain become part of dar al-Islam.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left's attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn't like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

Read all …

UPDATE: Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali stands by his views - Telegraph.

John Henry Newman to be Beatified

Damien Thompson gives English-speaking Catholics tip-top news: John Henry Cardinal Newman is to be beatified. May you pray for us, and for poor old England.

British Anti-Semitism Grows

Not that there's any lack of other depressing developments to brighten your day.

via Instapundit

Well, at least there's no patriarchy here, either . . .

Why gangs give boys what they need. (via Instapundit)

Double Standards @ BBC

The Koran’s take on Jesus, compliments of the BBC. Patrick Sookhdeo, an Anglican canon and spokesman for the Barnabas Fund, which works with persecuted Christians, accused broadcasters of double standards. Mr Sookhdeo, who was born a Muslim and converted to Christianity in 1969, said: "How would the Muslim community respond if ITV made a programme challenging Muhammad as the last prophet?"

Mental Experiment: Imagine a media representative in 1935 whose ideology is multiculturalism circa 2007. He or she wants to present democratic, monarchical, fascist, and National Socialist ideals on a radio show. Is this a realistic project? Why? Why not? Defend your position.