Orwellian society update: Germany, Ireland condemned by European Commission

From Catholic World News:

European Commission challenges Ireland, Germany on equality guidelines

Brussels, Feb. 25, 2008 (CWNews.com) - The European Commission is threatening action against Ireland for making Church-run institutions exempt from laws that ban discrimination on the basis of orientation and belief.

Irish law allows Church-related institutions such as schools, hospitals, and social agencies to reject employment applicants whose views or activities would violate religious norms. But Vladimir Spidla, the employment commissioner for the European Commission, has cited that policy as a violation of European law. The Irish government has not yet responded to the challenge from the European Commission. The European Commission is also challenging Germany's policy allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions. The European Commission argues that the German policy does not give same-sex couples all the legal benefits of marriage and therefore discriminates against homosexuals.

So much for religious freedom. The commissars of the Brussels autocracy have decided that homosexuality must be accommodated on its own terms, but no such accommodation is in turn to be extended to Christian institutions.

But there is another, vastly more important issue at stake here. Irish law mercifully grants to such institutions a right not to be forced to employ persons whose ethos and lifestyles contradict the moral teachings of the Christian religion. “European law”, however, would revoke that right. But this is Ireland, for goodness’ sake! Since when does “European law” trump Irish law within the borders of this republic? Is Ireland not then an independent state, a sovereign nation, with the freedom and authority to manage its own affairs, to regulate its own government, and to execute its own laws? Shall not the government and people of this nation of Ireland inform this Vladimir Spidla and his commission very politely that they may fuck off with themselves and with their “European law” and their equality legislation?

In this country, we, the people, elect to parliament those whom we choose to represent us in a general election held, under normal circumstances, every five years. After such elections (the most recent of which was held in 2007) the elected members of parliament (Teachta Dála in Irish, hence the abbreviation TD) have the mandate to form, among themselves, the next government, and from the ranks of whom the Taoiseach (prime minister) and ministers of cabinet are drawn. It is these Teachtaí Dála — and they alone — who are charged with the rule of this state, having been chosen for that purpose by the Irish people through the exercise of their suffrage.

The Irish people have not elected this Vladimir Spidla, or the members of his commission, nor have they chosen him to represent them in any capacity whatsoever. Nor is the kind of interference wherewith he has had to affrontery to reproach us provided for in any way by the Constitution of this state.

How dare this man, with his “European law” — which has no authority in this republic regardless of whatever treaties the Irish government may foolishly have ratified since the Third Amendment to the Constitution in 1972 — presume to assert that the laws of this country are “in violation” of norms passed by unelected committees in a foreign country with no authority over this sovereign nation of Ireland.

Ireland has as yet (Deo gratias) made no legal provision for the recognition of pseudo-matrimonial sodomitical unions, although the matter has been raised in the Dáil. Will Mr. Spidla and his commission henceforth attempt to force the hand of the Irish government, and attempt to decree into existence by sheer foreign bureaucratic might a state of affairs which, in time, would have come about in a perfectly legal and democratic fashion owing to the secularisation of this formerly Christian country? Or will Mr. Spidla attempt to have some kind of sanctions imposed on Ireland until this country should comply with his foreign will?

But Melancholicus wonders whether Ireland will not now be expelled from the EU altogether, since the Irish have grievously offended their serious, humourless European neighbours by daring to send a turkey to the Eurovision song contest, thus showing their contempt for that ridiculous carry-on and the way in which it has been manipulated in recent years.

Good luck, Dustin! There is at least one citizen of this formerly free state whose backing you have!

You've got to be kidding me

From the same nation that spawned the bishop who calls God Allah and whose Dominican province gave us priestless “masses” celebrated by Joe and Jane Bloggs, married or single, male or female, gay or straight, comes this latest howler:

Lent is now the “Christian Ramadan”!

From The Telegraph:

Lent fast re-branded as 'Christian Ramadan'

By Bruno Waterfield

Dutch Catholics have re-branded the Lent fast as the "Christian Ramadan" in an attempt to appeal to young people who are more likely to know about Islam than Christianity.

The Catholic charity Vastenaktie, which collects for the Third World across the Netherlands during the Lent period, is concerned that the Christian festival has become less important for the Dutch over the last generation.

"The image of the Catholic Lent must be polished. The fact that we use a Muslim term is related to the fact that Ramadan is a better-known concept among young people than Lent," said Vastenaktie Director, Martin Van der Kuil.

Three decades ago the Catholic Church was as strict as many Muslims are about Ramadan with a total ban on meat and alcohol during the 40-day Lenten period between Ash Wednesday and Easter.

Most Dutch Catholics now focus on charitable work after the Vatican loosened fasting strictures for all but the first and last days of Lent back in 1967.

Four million Dutch describe themselves as Roman Catholics and 400,000 people attend Mass every week but only a few tens of thousands still mark Lent by fasting, said Mr Van der Kuil.

Vastenaktie organisers hope that by linking the festival to Ramadan they can remind Christians who may be less observant than Muslims of the "spirituality and sobriety" of Lent.

"The agreements are more striking than the differences. Both for Muslims and Catholic faithful the values of frugality and spirituality play a central role in this tradition," said Mr Van der Kuil.

H/T to Dhimmi Watch.

What Melancholicus finds most disturbing is that in the Netherlands, apparently, Catholics are more familiar with Ramadan than with Lent. The chickens of Dignitatis Humanae have truly come home to roost. Furthermore, what kind of idiot could possibly think that the “agreements” between Catholicism and Mohammedanism “are more striking than the differences”? Let us not sully our holy Catholic faith with such a blasphemy now, please.

Out of a Catholic population of four million, only 400,000 attend weekly Mass. That’s 10%. Melancholicus is surprised by this statistic, since he was under the impression that actual Mass attendance in the Netherlands was closer to 2%. But since what passes for “Mass” in the Netherlands may not in fact be Mass at all, the true figure is probably much lower.

The Netherlands presents us with a case study of vital importance; this is a place where, prior to the council, the numbers of vocations and levels of Mass attendance were on a par with Ireland. Being one of the birthplaces of the conciliar revolution, it is the one country on earth in which the conciliar deformation has been carried to its furthest extent. What has happened to the Netherlands should serve as a salutary warning to the Church in other parts of the western world. The Dutch Church — if one can still speak of such a thing — is today a basket case, having descended to the lowest gibbering depths of self-worshipping congregationalism. It is not unreasonable to ask whether anything even remotely resembling Catholicism still exists in that unfortunate country.

Since our Dutch friends are so enamoured of Mohammedanism, why don’t they just observe Ramadan and have done with it? In fifty years the Netherlands will be a sharia state anyway.

Orwellian society update: anglican bishop forced to undergo "re-education"

From Catholic World News:

Anglican bishop fined for refusing gay youth worker

London, Feb. 12, 2008 (CWNews.com) - An Anglican bishop has been ordered to pay a heavy fine and undergo “equal-opportunies training” for refusing to approve the hiring of an openly homosexual man for a post in youth ministry.

The Cardiff Employment Tribunal on February 11 settled a discrimination case against Bishop Anthony Priddis of Hereford, ordering the bishop to £47,435 (about $92,000) in compensatory damages to John Reaney, who had complained that the bishop denied him a job as a youth worker because of his sexual orientation. The tribunal ordered that officials of the Hereford diocese who are engaged in hiring employees — including the bishop — should be given training to make them more sensitive to homosexual applicants.

Bishop Priddis said that he may appeal the panel’s ruling.

Let us expose this “equal opportunities training” for what it is: nothing more or less than brainwashing. It is an indoctrination of the kind practiced by communists seeking in a less than gentle manner to wean straying souls away from dangerous counter-revolutionary ideas. Not as overtly violent or psychologically damaging, to be sure, but the principle is exactly the same.

With whom is Oceania at war? Is it Eurasia or Eastasia? Melancholicus does not know, and he doubts that bishop Priddis knows either, but after the equal-ops nazis have done their work, the good bishop will probably be ready to parrot, without a trace of irony, whatever “truths” the henchmen of Ingsoc wish him to.

While Melancholicus does not know the details of this case beyond what has been included in the CWN story quoted above, he would be interested to discover if Mr. Reaney were refused employment solely on the grounds of his sexual proclivities, or if there were other reasons.

But it makes no difference. For once a “minority” of any stripe is refused employment on any grounds whatever, the good people of the middle class, politically correct social elite will assume immediately that such refusal can only be on foot of majoritarian discrimination.

Because Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia.

Pat Condell on Rowan Williams

A side of the sex industry that is seldom reported

From RTÉ:

Report finds rise in trafficking of women

A voluntary organisation working with prostitutes says it has seen an increase in the number of foreign women who have been trafficked into Ireland to work as prostitutes.

Ruhama also asserts that the women are more vulnerable to violence and exploitation because they are hidden away in brothels. Some, it says, are being held in captivity.

It claims that some lapdancing clubs force women into prostitution and it wants the Government to clamp down on the clubs by denying them drink licences.

Ruhama also wants the gardaí to set up a dedicated nationwide vice-squad and the Government to draft legislation to make it easier to prosecute those trafficking women.

The organisation says in the last two years it has dealt with 91 foreign women who were trafficked into Ireland, some held against their will. The organisation says the figure represents the tip of the iceberg.

Ruhama also drew attention to the recent opening of Ireland’s latest lap-dancing club in Kilkenny, which they have said is indicative of the nationwide growth of the sex industry and its re-branding as a form of entertainment.

This is perhaps the worst aspect of the sex industry: slavery re-packaged as entertainment.

It might be objected by proponents of the sex industry that many who work therein do so of their own volition, with all that blather about “consenting adults” and suchlike.

But how “consenting”, truly, are many of these adults? How many are forced into selling themselves into slavery by the relentless pressure of grinding poverty, or drug addiction? How many women are lured into western Europe from poorer countries with enticing promises of jobs and salaries, only to find themselves the victims of a pimp? Never mind those who have not yet reached the age of legal consent, the exploitation of whom is carefully hidden undeground so as not to sully that face of the sex industry that the mavens of the New Ireland^TM find so acceptable.

There will always be those who ply their trade in the industry because they derive erotic gratification thereby, but for the overwhelming majority, prostitution cannot be much more than distasteful if lucrative drudgery. For prostitution commands such a revenue that it can make its practitioners exceedingly wealthy. But how much of this wealth actually remains in the hands of those who do the hard work of earning it in the first instance?

In this, as in every other instance of slavery, the slave does the work; the slave-owner reaps the rewards.

Christopher Johnson on Rowan Williams

Melancholicus has no personal animus against his Lordship’s Grace of Canterbury, but he has a very keen interest in seeing to it that even the remotest possibility of sharia being recognised by British law is ruthlessly and immediately crushed.

Hence he has chosen to dwell on this topic a little longer, and he regrets if the patience of his readers is unduly taxed thereby.

Here is the reaction of the redoubtable Christopher Johnson, of the excellent Midwest Conservative Journal (to which Melancholicus links all too infrequently, alas). Melancholicus could not have said it better than this:

Dr. Williams has no business being shocked by this controversy. Rightly or wrongly, the Archbishop of Canterbury is still one of the most important religious figures in the world so that anything he says is going to paid attention to even by non-Anglicans.

What's tough to understand is Dr. Williams' obtuseness about all this. One reason, I think, has to do with the fact that my gracious lord of Canterbury is a liberal Anglican. Liberal Anglcans believe that all men, regardless of their religion, are reasonable and civilized and that all problems can be solved over a glass of really good Port.

So if the Muslim scholars with whom he regularly confers assure him that sharia is actually gentle and benign, Dr. Williams will be inclined to believe them. He will also be inclined to believe that Great Britain will easily be able to pick and choose which aspects of sharia will apply and which will not.

Confront him with the way that what sharia there is in Britain actually functions and he will profess to be horrified and tell you that "Muslim scholars" view such applications as distortions. Perhaps Dr. Williams and his defenders can explain what comfort the opinions of "Muslim scholars" will be to a Muslim woman dragged into a sharia court and then kicked to the curb by her abusive husband with the approval of such a barbaric "court" for I certainly cannot.

The other reason is much simpler. The idea of calling Muslim savagery what it is, the idea of standing up for the religion he claims to profess and the idea of telling Muslims that they are, well, wrong are ideas too terrifying for men like Rowan Williams to contemplate.

So it is much easier to have "interfaith" meetings than to confront the truth. It is far easier to believe the honeyed words of "Muslim scholars" that sharia doesn't really mean that.

Because if you know what sharia really is and how it is really applied, you have to speak out against such an evil. Unless you value the opinion of the world more than the opinion of your God. Or unless you are a moral coward.

Or both.

Mr. Johnson also links to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in The Independent, giving a Muslim woman’s perspective on the practice of sharia, and an article which Melancholicus recommends to all his readers.

Al-Beeb to the rescue

Rowan need not worry, since the Beeb is on his side. Melancholicus has learned, via Biased BBC blog, that a concerted effort is now underway to present his views on sharia law and the British legal system as the soundest common sense and to deflect public attention away from the repeated calls for his resignation that have issued forth from within the Church of England.

Yesterday, BBC Radio 4’s regular Thought for the Day on the Today programme featured a softly-spoken, educated, urbane and very British-sounding Muslim politely defending Rowan’s wisdom and attempting to calm the ruffled waters. The reader may listen to the broadcast here (requires Real Player; or simply read the transcript). Melancholicus feels that the point, though, was not to defend the archbishop of Canterbury, or even to present his views as reasonable; the point was to enable the BBC to distance itself from any suggestion that sharia law might actually be something insidious and nasty. In the last paragraph it is referred to, pointedly and reverently, as a “heritage of legal wisdom” for Muslims. The speaker made no reference to the fact that sharia law prescribes horrific public punishments for trivial misdemeanours, and is so utterly divorced from both reality and compassion that in countries where this foul code holds sway, rape victims are frequently stoned for adultery.

Andrew Marr is proud of the fact that the BBC employs an “abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people”. That explains a lot. Young people, who don’t know anything about anything, and lack the capability and the motivation to even think of questioning the institutional leftism of the organisation for which they work; ethnic minorities [read Muslims] who unfailingly pursue a line favourable to their own group; and gay people — well, enough said. If ever one wondered why al-Beeb is always in bed with either the Mohammedan or the homosexualist (or sometimes both simultaneously), well here’s the best explanation that Melancholicus has ever encountered.

And on this occasion, the latest outbreak of Rowan Williams’ recurring foot-in-mouth disease, the BBC clearly felt it had to step in and clarify matters — lest Muslims be embarrassed.

Religion of Peace update: right on cue

At the outset of the current furore over the recent tactless remarks by his Lordship’s Grace of Canterbury, Melancholicus considered that all we need to inject a dose of realism into this matter is a good display of how adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law can help maintain social cohesion.

And here it is, right on cue. From Catholic World News:

Christians suffer in Nigerian religious violence

Lagos, Feb. 8, 2008 (CWNews.com) - About 1,000 Christians have been driven from their homes, and every Christian church destroyed, in a rash of religious violence in a northern Nigerian state, reports Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).

The violence in the heavily Islamic Bauchi state began when a young Christian woman was charged with blaspheming the prophet Mohammed, CSW reports. (Christian neighbors say that the young woman was the target of reprisal by a spurned Muslim admirer.) A mob gathered at the young woman's house, police opened fire on the crowd, and a riot broke out in which the Christian minority suffered from assaults, arson, looting, and vandalism.

Nigeria's northern region is dominated by Muslims, and Christians have expressed mounting fears about the imposition of shari'a law and disenfranchisement of religious minorities.

In fairness to Dr. Williams, Melancholicus feels duty bound to acknowledge that he does not believe for a moment that Dr. Williams advocates this kind of carry on, much less public floggings, stonings, amputations and beheadings, or the treatment of women as little more than slaves.

But there is no such thing as a little bit of sharia; if any western government should ever stoop to the folly of legally recognising sharia law, the effect will be to establish a state within a state and to transfer sovereignty from the government to the mullahs. Recognising any individual principle of sharia will be tantamount to swallowing the entire beast. To admit any part will be ultimately to admit the whole, whether intended or not. And the Mohammedans, emboldened by such unexpected success, will press for even greater control over the dhimmified majority.

Thereafter, this kind of mass Islamic violence, which is routine in parts of Africa and Asia, will become routine in Europe also.

What date is it?

It’s January 1943.

Puzzled? It will all be made clear in a moment.

The Archbishop (of happy memory) used to say that there have been three world wars: the first of 1914-18, the second of 1939-45, and the third of 1962-65.

But, with all due regard to the Archbishop’s analogy, the Third World War did not end in 1965; it is still being fought today, in every diocese across the world, in every religious order, in every seminary and Catholic institute of education; even in every parish.

Some readers may consider it an impious thing to compare this putative “Third World War” with the actual Second World War, especially in view of the colossal carnage, destruction, displacement and loss of life occasioned by the latter. But since we are Christians, we have a supernatural view of human history, and the cost to souls as a result of our still-ongoing Third World War has been no less grievous than that of the Second.

In January 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle ever fought, was drawing to its end. A massive Soviet counter-attack which began in November 1942 succeeded in encircling and cutting off the German 6th Army which had besieged the city since the previous July. By January 1943, the German position was hopeless. It was by then too late to withdraw; the Germans could have done so earlier and cut their losses by retreating and regrouping—and perhaps they could have attacked again after being reinforced—but, with a determination to fight to the very last man that was almost Japanese in its hysterical fervour, Adolf Hitler absolutely forbade any retreat under any circumstances whatsoever. The forces of the great German Reich could not possibly entertain the notion of retreat! It would be victory or annihilation; and so the 6th Army, comprising the most capable and most experienced of Germany’s fighting men, was abandoned to its fate. Shortly before the end, Hitler even promoted the commander of the 6th Army, General Friedrich Paulus, to the rank of Field Marshal. No German Field Marshal had ever before surrendered, so Paulus knew he was expected either to work a miracle and take the city against all the odds, or else to commit suicide and thus avert the shame of surrender. The Soviets, recognising that the Germans were in an impossible situation, offered to accept their surrender with generous terms. Paulus was a soldier above all, not a National Socialist fanatic, and with the words “I have no intention of shooting myself for that Bohemian corporal”, he surrendered to the Soviet forces on 2 February—the feast of Candlemas. With the defeat of the 6th Army, the Wehrmacht had lost 300,000 seasoned troops, had failed to capture Stalingrad, and the USSR was in a much stronger position strategically and militarily than when the battle had started. With all due regard for the heroism of the Soviet troops who broke the siege of Stalingrad and surrounded the German forces, the 6th Army was defeated not by Stalin or Rokossovsky, or even by the harsh Russian winter; the German 6th Army was defeated by Adolf Hitler.

Despite his mesmeric charisma (upon which many who met him have remarked) and his powerful personality, Hitler possessed nothing even remotely approaching military genius. If he was the reason Germany went to war in 1939, he was also the reason Germany lost the same war in 1945. The brilliant successes of 1939 and 1940 gave the impression to friend and foe alike that the Wehrmacht was unstoppable, and that Germany’s final victory was all but assured. But even at that early stage, Hitler had already shown himself incompetent to command, having overridden the sound advice of his staff—much to the frustration of German military commanders who actually knew what they were doing. The famous evacuation of the allied armies from Dunkirk in 1940 only took place at all because Hitler expressly ordered a halt to the German advance, a halt which bought the allies precious time to escape. Then there was the decision in the same year to focus the Luftwaffe’s attacks on English cities rather than on military targets, a blunder for which Hermann Goering shares responsibility, and which allowed the RAF to continue the fight and then to win the Battle of Britain. Then there was the decision to delay the 1941 German invasion of Russia until June, which meant that winter stole upon the Germans before they could capture Moscow and so their advance bogged down. They never did capture Moscow. The decision to invade Russia at all was itself a blunder. Then there was Hitler’s slow and almost unconcerned response to the D-Day invasion, among sundry other gaffes, not to mention the continual diversion of manpower and resources in implementing the Führer’s racial policies in conquered territories; his obsession with finally solving “the Jewish question” led to one of the most egregious mass murders in history, and significantly detracted from the German war effort: German Jews and leading scientists who had fled from their homeland in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution were instrumental in the development for the United States of the atomic bomb. When all is said and done, the Germans’ fiercest enemy in World War II was not the British, or the Americans, or the Soviets; it was their own commander in chief.

Melancholicus must admit that the foregoing critique of Hitler as a military commander was a tangent, so let us now return to Stalingrad and to the point of this post. What makes the Battle of Stalingrad so significant is that it marks the first major reverse for the German war machine. Stalingrad was a turning point in the war. Thitherto, everything had been going Hitler’s way. Well, not quite everything. There was the inconvenience of the Battle of Britain, after which Operation Sealion had to be aborted. There was the somewhat more serious inconvenience of the Second Battle of El-Alamein—contemporary, incidentally, with the siege of Stalingrad—which resulted in the expulsion of the axis from North Africa, and the consequent ability of the allies to threaten Fortress Europe from across the Mediterranean. But the failure to occupy Britain and the failure to hold North Africa were not in themselves decisive. It was not until the surrender of the 6th Army at Stalingrad that Germany began losing the war, for the subsequent history of the German campaign in Russia is one of constant retreat and regroup in a desperate and futile attempt to halt the advance of the Soviet counter-attack. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, the writing was thenceforth on the wall, and the events of April 1945 were from that moment inevitable.

So now, in our analogical comparison between the Second and Third World Wars, we have reached January 1943. We have reached the conciliar church’s Stalingrad. For the past forty years, everything has been going the way of the conciliar revolutionaries. They have, in the ecclesiastical version of Blitzkrieg, marched from triumph to triumph with scarcely a single reverse. They have seized control of seminaries, universities, diocesan chanceries, bishops’ conferences, and practically the entire mainstream Catholic media. Their lackeys write the religious education textbooks used by our children in Catholic schools. Their programmes and workshops have indoctrinated Catholic teachers in conciliar religion. Their revolutionary liturgy is celebrated in almost every single parish in the entire Catholic world. The revolutionaries’ views of scripture, of tradition, of liturgy, of sacraments, of catechetics, of ecumenism, of the respective roles of the priesthood and the laity, of sexual morality, of everything in fact, have become the norm. Our Catholic people have been conciliarised, to the extent that they no longer know what is true and what is false, nor are they even aware of it. Of course the revolutionaries have experienced a few setbacks in the last forty years; much as Hitler was unable to suppress the British in 1940, so the conciliar revolutionaries were unable to have the traditional Roman Mass actually banned by the Holy See (although they tried!). Nevertheless, they were able to hold it—and the entire Catholic faith—at arm’s length for most of this period. Much as the Germans were unable to hold North Africa at El-Alamein in 1942, so the conciliarists were unable to prevent the Archbishop from proceeding with the consecrations in 1988, which meant that Rome had to sit up and finally take the Traditionalist movement seriously. But despite these setbacks—a slap on the wrist for a Küng here, a faint-hearted indult permitting celebration of the ancient Mass under restrictive conditions there—the revolutionaries’ grip on the Church and on the reins of power continued.

Until now. Until the reign of Pope Benedict XVI, whereat the traditions and the faith of our holy Church have at last begun to emerge from the catacombs to which they were consigned after the Blitzkrieg of the revolutionaries. Until the Holy Father’s recent motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, which liberalised not only the ancient Mass, but all the liturgical books in use before the liturgical deformations of Vatican II. No longer do faithful priests have to depend upon the diktat of authoritarian modernist bishops for access to that Mass which is the right of their ordination. The absolute stranglehold of the heretics upon the Church has been loosed; their grip is faltering, their confidence is shaken, and they can see on the horizon the next generation of younger orthodox priests in cassocks and nuns in full habits fast approaching them with a grim determination, like the innumerable divisions of the Red Army which broke the siege of Stalingrad and harried the retreating Wehrmacht all the way to Berlin itself.

Summorum Pontificum is the conciliar church’s Stalingrad, and as such it is a turning point in the war. From this point on, the revolutionaries are in retreat. They still occupy almost the whole territory of holy Church, but their supplies and reinforcements have been cut off. No-one is following in their footsteps; their dissent has inspired no vocations to take their place. They have no heirs.

And now that they are old, or at the very least in late middle age, death and retirement will by degrees remove them from the scene. Their passing will not be mourned. Not by me, not by anyone.

This, to quote Churchill, is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

It might still be 1943.

The war is not over yet. There is still a long road ahead and much to do. There will be much suffering in this blackest of dark nights before the dawn comes again.

But it will soon be 1945.

We will beat them. We will win.

Grant, we beseech Thee, most merciful Lord, through the intercession of Saint Joseph, patron of the Universal Church, that the peace, beauty and dignity of the Tridentine Latin Mass may be restored to our churches, and that the holy Catholic faith may be restored to its proper place once again.

Normal service has been resumed as soon as possible

Regular visitors to this journal will have noticed that no new posts have appeared in the last fortnight. This is the first occasion since the (re)launch of Infelix Ego that Melancholicus has had to apologize to his readers for such an untoward hiatus.

It just happens that at present the author is so busy with work that he hardly has time to lift his head, and in the meantime, patient reader, he begs your indulgence.

Work is such a regrettable thing; it makes one tired, anxious, and steals time away from such valuable pursuits as social intercourse and blogging. True, it provides one with one’s crust, but for Melancholicus it is very much a means to an end, and not something he particularly enjoys.

This spate of frenetic activity will soon pass, and with God’s help we will all be back to normal thereafter.

Pat Condell on the Muslim Council of Britain

That doesn’t sound quite right, does it? No, Melancholicus doesn’t mean to infer that Pat Condell has actually joined the Muslim Council of Britain (that would be one for the books!). Rather, we present here a video of Mr. Condell offering his (rather strong) views on the Muslim Council of Britain.

Melancholicus was prompted to post this video owing to the brouhaha that has erupted over the timely warnings of Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester, in The Sunday Telegraph of 6th January last (see here for more details). In the wake of the bishop’s comments, a variety of Mohammedan organisations complained publicly about Dr. Nazir-Ali’s brazen political incorrectness; the response of the Muslim Council of Britain may be read here.

Melancholicus has observed, however, that the MCB are just as ready to give offence as to take it. Their current leader, one Muhammad Abdul Bari, accused the British Government last November of stoking Muslim tension owing to the concerns expressed by MI5 about the grooming of future suicide bombers from within the Muslim community in Britain. This man seems to be more concerned about “Islamophobia” and about the public perception of his community (article in The Telegraph here) than he is about the horrendous problems within that community — religious extremism, forced marriages, abductions, honour killings, and suchlike outrages. Is this man not aware that the way in which certain Muslims behave has caused far more “suspicion and unease” than anything ever said or done by the Government or MI5? And then there is the bare-faced arrogance; this same man, among numerous others, has had the gall to suggest publicly that Britain should adopt Islamic values. Of course if this madness were actually implemented by the dhimmis currently ensconced in the House of Commons, the number of Islamic “values” adopted by British society would continue to grow and expand until in the end Britain would be a sharia state, hardly distinguishable from Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban. Which of course is precisely what the good old boys of the MCB want.

Melancholicus could go on at length, but he will allow the much more eloquent Pat Condell to speak on his behalf. Some readers might be upset that Melancholicus has invited this gentleman to appear on Infelix Ego. But the prosecution has called this particular witness precisely because Mr. Condell despises all religions indiscriminately, and consequently cannot be accused of criticising Muslims or Islam on foot of any Christian bias. Aside from the off-colour remark about Catholic clergy and a somewhat earthy turn of phrase, Melancholicus considers that his readers will find much wherewith to agree in Mr. Condell’s comments, and will certainly support his robust opposition to the creeping islamicization of the west.

Time now for some Muslim-baiting.

Mohammedan 'call to prayer' in Oxford?

Back at the beginning of Epiphanytide, Melancholicus posted on the bishop of Rochester, Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, in support of the bishop’s argument that Mohammedans in Britain banding themselves together in separate communities distinct from the population at large is creating no-go areas for non-Muslims in certain parts of the country.

The various organs of British political correctness reacted to Dr. Nazir-Ali’s article in predictable fashion, battening down the hatches and distancing themselves as much as possible from such incorrect views. As might have been expected, the bishops of the Church of England neither supported nor defended their colleague, but recoiled in horror as though he were a particularly virulent and deadly strain of virus.

One prelate, however, the Right Rev. John Pritchard, bishop of Oxford (pictured left), has actually gone as far as to welcome and support a Mohammedan drive to issue the ‘call to prayer’ from loudspeakers in his diocese. This bishop of a Christian church has taken appeasement of these people to a whole new level. Doubtless the fellow thinks he’s being charitable, magnanimous and ecumenical; to the the Mohammedans, however, this is just one more example of the ongoing weakness and apostasy of Christians in the west, and Rev. Pritchard’s gesture will earn him not their gratitude but their contempt.

From the Oxford Mail:

Bishop backs Muslim prayer call

By Fran Bardsley

The Bishop of Oxford has rejected another senior clergyman's fears that broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer in East Oxford could create a "no-go area" for non-Muslims.

The Rt Rev John Pritchard backed plans for the call to prayer in Oxford - splitting away from controversial comments made by the Anglican Church's only Asian Bishop, the Rt Rev Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, of Rochester.

Bishop Michael said attempts were being made to impose an "Islamic character" on communities, creating no-go areas where people of different faiths would find it hard to live and work.

But Bishop John said: "I want to distance myself from what the Bishop of Rochester has said.

"There are no no-go areas in this country that we are aware of and in all parts of the country there are good interfaith relationships developing."

Leaders at Oxford's Central Mosque, in Manzil Way, are considering asking for planning permission to issue the call to prayer from the mosque - and Bishop John said he was "very happy" with the move.

He said: "I believe we have good relationships with the Muslim community here in Oxford and I am personally very happy for the mosque to call the faithful to prayer in East Oxford.

"Faith is a very important factor in the lives of 80 per cent of the world's population and a public expression of that faith is both natural and reasonable."

Bishop John said practical issues over the number of times the call went out, the volume and whether a trial period would be required would need to be ironed out but said in principle it was "entirely reasonable".

He said: "I would say to anyone who has concerns about the call to prayer to relax and enjoy our community diversity and be as respectful to others as you would hope they would be respectful to you."

He added: "I sympathise with those who find any kind of expression of public faith intrusive, but I think part of being part of a tolerant society is saying, 'I don't agree with this but I accept it as part of my responsibility as being part of a diverse community'."

Bishop Michael told the Sunday Telegraph that non-Muslims faced a hostile relationship in places dominated by the ideology of Islamic radicals.

He used the amplification of the call to prayer as an example of how an Islamic character was being imposed on certain areas and said this resulted in alienating young non-Muslims.

An application for planning permission for the call to prayer at Oxford's Central Mosque has not yet been submitted.

Sardar Rana, a spokesman for the mosque, said he was "100 per cent sure" people would like the call to prayer when they heard it.

100% sure, eh? Would Sardar care to put any money on that? Melancholicus would be quite happy to oppose him in a wager.

The article has been online for less than a week, but has already attracted over 200 comments. From a perusal of some of them it appears that the good people of Oxford are distinctly less enthusiastic than their bishop about transforming Oxford into the city of dreaming minarets.

Come back Richard Harries, all is forgiven!

Le Pen visit cancelled

Melancholicus feels vindicated. The authorities have acted in precisely the fashion he predicted they would.

So what is this about?

Remember, gentle reader, that back in October we were talking about the socialists having their little meet to venerate the memory of Saint Che, martyr?

At the time Melancholicus sourly complained about the fact that nobody seems to mind the socialists organising public meetings to eulogise mass murderers, so long as those murderers committed their crimes in the service of left-wing politics. Being on the left, it seems, is sufficient to render their atrocities palatable, at least socially if not quite morally.

Melancholicus then predicted what would happen if someone were to organise a public meeting venerating the legacies of right-wing murderers, such as Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Eichmann.

Well, this has actually happened! And the predictions that Melancholicus made at the time have been fulfilled almost to the letter.

Well, not quite — but almost. A student society at the institution where Melancholicus earns his living has invited a prominent figure of the European right to participate in a debate on the Treaty of Lisbon. This person is not actually a Nazi (at least not in the same league as Heydrich or Eichmann), but he is viewed as such by the left and by their hangers-on in the media. He is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front.

Now Monsieur Le Pen was not invited to this institiution to commemorate murderers of any stripe. The sole purpose of his being here was to debate the Lisbon Treaty. The visit was due to take place in March or April of this year, and Monsieur Le Pen was to be accompanied by his colleague, Bruno Gollnisch MEP. However, the visit was cancelled almost as soon as it was announced.

The hue and cry that erupted after Monsieur Le Pen’s proposed visit had become public knowledge was annoyingly predictable; people will get upset over a right-wing politician like Le Pen, but not over a left-wing murderous psychopath like Guevara. The same people who festooned the walls of the university with flyers celebrating Guevara’s bloodstained career as well as the excesses of the Russian revolution immediately flooded the halls with posters denouncing the visit of the fascist Le Pen. Fascist is a pejorative they love to throw around with alacrity. Anyone who disagrees with the politics of these people is in their eyes a counter-revolutionary and a capitalist; disagree with them strongly enough and you become a fascist.

The college authorities, sensing the danger and the possible political fallout from the proposed visit, immediately moved to quash the invitation, and so Monsieur Le Pen will not now be invited to visit these shores. Melancholicus is relieved at the outcome—not so much that the “fascist” has been banned, but that the university where he works will be spared the turbulence and upheaval of such an event; Melancholicus does not care for riots and student demonstrations and threats of violence and uncontrolled passions and anarchist thugs shouting and people’s cars being overturned and set on fire and barricades being erected and the presence of the police being required to restrain the mob in order that people might not be killed. The campus can do without these things, and on that account he is glad that Monsieur Le Pen will not be coming.

That Monsieur Le Pen should have been invited in the first place, and that by a student society is a source of wonderment to Melancholicus. Students are notorious the world over for their hard-left views.

But as for the socialists, let me see... they hold public meetings glorifying the careers of the dictatorial thug Hugo Chavez, as well as murderers like Ernesto Guevara, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and at the same time they deny basic freedom of speech to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who never killed anyone.

Is there not a double standard in operation here?

Those pathetic loons.

Muslims against sharia and that damned logical principle of non-contradiction

Every now and then, Melancholicus comes upon a post written by another blogger that is just so perspicacious and to the point that he feels duty bound to reproduce such wisdom on Infelix Ego for the benefit of his readers. Yesterday he discovered just such a post while reading Orwell’s Picnic; Hilary has been rather active of late, much to the satisfaction of this member of her reading public.

The post in question addresses a new Islamic reforming movement that has appeared of late, a movement which seeks to excise the rationale for islamist violence by editing the Qur’an to remove all the nasty bits that are used by the fanatics to support their “holy war” on all non-believers. This movement is called Muslims Against Sharia, and their website may be viewed here. There is also a blog which is worth a look.

While the enterprise of Muslims Against Sharia is both noble and commendable, and while Melancholicus would certainly be inclined to support it, Hilary draws attention to the fundamental illogic in professing religious faith in Islam on the one hand and in taking it upon oneself to edit the Qur’an according to criteria that one decides oneself—in effect rewriting the Qur’an to suit one’s own tastes. This cavalier rewriting does not trouble Melancholicus in the slightest, since he does not believe the Qur’an to be in the least bit divinely inspired, let alone dictated by God directly from heaven—but it does raise unavoidable questions about truth and authority within Islam.

The big problem of course is that most Muslims will simply not buy into the idea of editing their holy book according to criteria established by mere mortals—and the extremists certainly won’t, as they are surely bound to view Muslims Against Sharia as apostates, and anything that they may say (never mind their doctored Qur’an) as the most egregious heresy.

But let us now hear Hilary on the matter:

It reminds me a bit, somewhat incongruously perhaps, of John Henry Newman's efforts to bring Anglicanism back to its origins and to create some kind of reconciliation between the CofE and its apostolic Christian roots. Of course, in this investigation Newman was too honest and diligent and his work brought him into the Catholic Faith. (While others of his clique, carried on in their desperate delusions, bringing us the weird and surreal house of mirrors known as "high" or "traditional" Anglicanism.) Perhaps it reminds me of Newman's solution for the Protestant Problem because there are certain correspondences between that and the Muslim Problem.

It strikes me also that the item gives us a hint of why the so-called "liberal left" is currently so dedicated to the Islamic project of world domination. It is not just that they are both bent on the same goal, to wit, the utter demolition of Christian culture and the philosophical assumptions upon which it is founded. It is deeper than that.

Adherents to the modern authoritarian leftism currently in fashion in places like the newsrooms of the BBC and Guardian, are making common cause with the Mahometans and their brand of authoritarianism because their ideology comes from Protestant authoritarianism. The "new left" is merely a logical extension of the ultra-authoritarian Calvinism that preceded it. Calvinism also, if you recall, required its adherents to slavishly submit to the words of the Bible as though it is the literal word-for-word dictated message from God. It also required its followers to conform their thoughts to an unquestioning acceptance of a number of logical contradictions. To a 17th century Calvinist, the idea of interpreting the bible was a capital offense.

Similarly the proposal to examine and edit the Koran to bring it into line with Christian moral values seems to be a self-defeating and self-refuting proposal, one that neatly exposes the inherent logical contradiction at the heart of Islam.

I wonder what an honest, objective Muslim who is not normally inlined to become a "homicidal zombie", would make of the Koran when approached in the way these people seem to be suggesting.

It does create a little dilemma doesn't it? Islam requires unconditional and unexamined submission to Allah; this requires submitting to the notion that the Koran (unedited) is the actual literal faxed-to-earth-by-angels words of Allah. But because of the manifestly evil and self-contradictory content of the Koran, to do this, they must turn off both their conscience and their intellect.

But if Muslims then edit the Koran to make it nicer (and, let's face it, more Christian), how can they possibly "submit" to it? It would then have to be admitted that it is not the literally dictated words of Allah, but a book written by human beings for their own purposes. The entire religious proposal of Islam then collapses.

The problem of Islam is this:

The Koran is the literal word of Allah,
but the Koran is manifestly wicked, and is full of contradictions,
leading to only two possible logical conclusions: that Allah either does not exist at all and was invented by an evil megalomaniac to further his dreams of world conquest, or is a ravening demonic monster who must under no circumstances be mistaken for the living God.

This leads us to the next problem:
Islam requires submission to Allah, as revealed to man in the Koran.
But human beings are endowed naturally by their Creator with the ability to tell right from wrong and are created with the freedom to choose between them.
If a man submits to Islam, he knows that he is submitting either to the demonic monster Allah, or to something he knows is false. Either way, in order to submit to it, he must do violence to his nature and suppress his conscience and his intellect in order to do something wicked and dishonest. He must, in other words, become a wicked and dishonest man himself.

But to try to solve this dilemma by making the Koran better, by trying to make Allah into the True God, he is back to dishonesty again. If he remains a Muslim, since the only thing a Muslim is required to believe, the only "tenet" of Islam is utter submission to the Koran as it is, he must admit that his religion is wrong, false. To say he submits, but only to parts of the Koran, is to say he submits only to his own preferences, and we are back to dishonesty and internal contradictions again.

The only way out is to ask the question, "Can the Koran in its entirety be the true word of God?" And if we are starting with Christian presuppositions about the nature of God (He is always good, cannot will evil and cannot ever contradict His own nature), we are obliged to say that the idea of a good God is always and can only be utterly contrary and opposed to the savage beast represented as God in the Koran.

What they seem to be admitting is that the only way to be a good Muslim is to be a bad Muslim.

Now, the human intellect, will and conscience, in its natural un-deformed state, is ordered to that which is objectively good because it was made not by man, nor by the monster Allah, but by the true God who can only make good things and only will the good.

From this it naturally follows that no human being who wants to do good can submit to the Koran without deforming his conscience in some way. Either by using the pretense of obedience to the wicked instructions in the Koran to excuse the evil he wants to do in life anyway (beat his wife, murder people who disagree with him, rape, launch Human Rights Commission complaints against magazines and publishers, and blow up buildings) or he can pull a Winston Smith and masochistically force himself to submit and love something he knows is false. His religion requires that he become, in other words, either a bad man with a hopelessly deformed conscience, or a self-enslaved dhimmi living a lie.

Both of which will make him into the kind of monster so beloved of the demon Allah.

Which is precisely what we have seen.

Anyway,

Muslims against Sharia, it seems to me, are trying to figure out a way out of this impossible logical contradiction: they are trying to be good men and good Muslims at the same time.

The debate that has since arisen in the commbox is also well worth reading.

Whatever one may think about Muslims against Sharia and whether the kind of reformation they advocate is compatible with the profession of Islam at all, it is nonetheless heartening to see a group of Muslims willing to oppose the religious fanatics in their midst and to take a stand for freedom of speech, personal liberty, democratic government and all that good stuff that we in the west have traditionally enjoyed, and which values which we tend not, on the whole, to associate with Muslim societies. While Melancholicus considers their project as ultimately doomed to failure, he is impressed by the courage of these people, who are prepared to risk their necks—literally—in the struggle against extremism.

The evil fruits of Dignitatis Humanae

Will someone please tell Melancholicus, is this man a bishop or a politician? His enthusiasm for pluralism and multiculturalism in the schools of his diocese befits more a member of the Labour Party than it does a Catholic prelate.

From RTÉ:

Dublin schools to end Catholic-first policy

The Archdiocese of Dublin has approved a new school enrolment policy, which will see schools for the first time setting aside a quota of places for non-Catholic pupils.

The new admissions system is being introduced on a pilot basis in two primary schools in west Dublin.

Until now all schools belonging to the Archdiocese were obliged to enrol Catholic applicants first.

This significant development is a break with a policy that last year proved highly controversial.

The two schools with the new policy, St Patrick's and St Mochta's, are located in an area that has seen massive population growth.

Last year, an emergency school had to be set up to take in the non-Catholic children they could not accommodate and most of these were the children of immigrants.

This new policy is an attempt to ensure such divisions do not happen again.

It keeps two thirds of junior infant places for Catholics, but makes the rest available to non-Catholics.

The schools say they want a mix and that they want to reflect the communities they serve.

Their patron, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, agrees and he has asked parents to support the schools' initiative.

The Irish Primary Principals network welcomed the decision, saying it was a positive response to the enrolment challenges that schools are encountering.

As much as Melancholicus would prefer to see foreigners integrating themselves into the rest of the Irish population rather than forming separate, closed-off ghetto-style communities (as the Mohammedans do in Britain), he cannot approve of this initiative by his local ordinary, which could see Catholic children denied a place at their local school in order that non-Catholics—or even non-Christians—might claim those places instead. It is at the very least distasteful to witness the shepherd of the flock in this diocese, to whose care the souls of all the faithful are entrusted, depriving his own lambs of their food and giving it instead to outsiders. Furthermore, Melancholicus can hardly imagine either St. Patrick or his disciple St. Mochta (in whose honour these schools are dedicated) approving of this policy; picture the absurdity of places in an Irish monastic school in the age of conversion being reserved—with no necessity of baptism—for the sons of pagans, and the reader will understand how foolish—and how pandering to the spirit of this age—is the new policy of the Dublin archdiocese.

Nor, of course, will admitting non-Christian children to Catholic schools involve any question of proselytism, so we won’t even have the compensatory benefit of recruiting any new catechumens; Dignitatis Humanae has long since seen to that. That nefarious document disowned the very idea of a Catholic state; now precisely the same principles are put to work towards ending Catholic education.

The presence of non-Catholic children in a Catholic school will immediately result in a watering-down of the school’s Catholic ethos, since in these politically-correct times it will be seen as chauvinistic to parade one’s culture in front of ‘minorities’, even if this is done in complete innocence and without any ‘triumphalistic’ intent. Political correctness has conditioned many otherwise well intentioned and intelligent people to fear exposing minorities to any expression of ‘majoritarian’ culture, as though there were something inherently ‘racist’ in, say, displaying a crucifix on the wall of a Catholic classroom in which there happens to be a half dozen Sikhs or Muslims. Once the minorities are admitted, the crucifixes will quietly vanish; classroom prayers will be quietly discontinued—or else replaced by some generic fluff completely devoid of any specifically Catholic content and which could be said in good conscience by the adherents of any other religion; statues, icons, etc. will be removed and replaced with non-religious images so as not to ‘offend’ the sensibilities of any non-Christian child that might happen to be enrolled there.

This erosion of the culture of the majority is of course a one-way street, for there will be no such curbs on the culture of the minorities. Pupils belonging to other faiths will be encouraged to celebrate their own traditions and to share their culture and beliefs with their Catholic classmates. Catholic schoolchildren will hear much in their Catholic school about Allah and Krishna and Mohammed and Guru Nanak and who knows what else; but they will be told nothing of Jesus Christ, or His blessed mother, or the Trinity, or the Holy Bible, or anything specifically and recognisably Christian.

But what is Melancholicus thinking? So-called Catholic schools in this post-conciliar age are hardly havens of the Catholic religion even now, are they? Religious education in Ireland, long since hobbled by the execrable and even heretical Alive-O series, has long since been reduced to vacuous, airy-fairy, anthropocentric pap devoid of recognisably Catholic content. It is the conciliar religion, rather than Catholicism, that currently holds sway in Irish Catholic schools. So on balance, once this policy is implemented, Catholic schoolchildren will not really be losing out on anything they didn’t have before, will they?

But now, before we finish, imagine a Catholic child enrolled in an Islamic school. Do you think, gentle reader, that allowances would be made to accommodate this child and her religious sensibilities? On the contrary, she would be required to pray the Muslim prayers with her Muslim classmates; she would be compelled to wear the hijab in school despite the fact that she is not a Muslim; she would be told, forcefully and repeatedly, that Allah has no son, that the Trinity is unclean, that Christians and Jews are deserving of hellfire, that there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, and that the Qur’an and not the Bible is the word of God.

That’s a rather different picture, isn’t it?

Naivete and the sex industry in Ireland

If one is in favour of pornography, topless bars, lap-dancing, prostitution and the sex industry in general, one ought at least be able to provide some reasons for one’s views—reasons which, if not entirely convincing, at least furnish others with evidence that one has considered the matter in an intellectual fashion.

Here in Ireland, folk are at the moment much in a tizzy about the proposed opening of a lap-dancing club in Kilkenny. Regardless of whether one considers this to be a marvellous stride forward into maturity or a regression into juvenilia, such is the regrettable parochialism of this small nation that no one seems to be able to stop talking about it.

Today Melancholicus was testily drumming the steering wheel while delayed in the morning rush hour beyond all reasonable endurance. Anyhow, he shall resist the urge to complain about the frustrations attendant upon commuting in Dublin, because once he starts he’ll never stop. He should of course pray more for serenity while on the road, but matters are not helped by the fact that he has thus far failed four driving tests, and to exhibit a learner-plate on one’s car in Dublin seems to send a clear signal to all other traffic that the driver is a fair target for bullying.

But let us return to the point of this post.

To ease his impatience he turned over to Newstalk 106, on which Brenda Power was beginning her morning phone-in show Your Call. Among other things, the fact that Kilkenny city’s first such sex club will open its doors this coming Friday featured in the discussions (interested parties may read the relevant newspaper coverage in The Irish Times here).

What exasperates Melancholicus most of all about such events as this is the content of the ignorant and thoughtless text messages that are routinely sent to the various radio stations whenever anything to do with the sex industry is aired in this country. First prize for idiot text of the day must surely go to the clown who sent the following message in to Newstalk:

“Other modern countries have lap-dancing clubs. Ireland is now a modern country. Hopefully Catholic Ireland is dead.”

So, according to the perverse logic of this texter, the level at which the sex industry has proliferated in this country is to be taken as the index of how modern and sophisticated Ireland has become! But that is not all. The “modern Ireland” of lap-dancing and suchlike is contrasted with “Catholic Ireland”, which lacked such progressive institutions as lap-dancing. The texter clearly has an animus against “Catholic Ireland”, seemingly because the sex industry was not promoted by the latter. Or perhaps he/she (probably he) was simply grabbing the opportunity to claim his fifteen minutes of fame by having his Catholic-bashing text read out on air.

What Melancholicus finds most irritating is the implicit notion that opposition to the sex industry stems only from traditional religious beliefs, and that if there were no religion the sex industry would be something fine and dandy that everyone would approve of. He has encountered this unthinking and uncritical attitude on more than one occasion. The only arguments he has ever heard advanced in favour of the sex industry in this country are those hackneyed slogans which celebrate “liberation” from the “repression” of “Catholic Ireland”. On the occasion of the opening of the first lap-dancing club in Ireland in 1999/2000, the aptly-named Declan Moroney, a journalist for the now defunct tabloid paper Ireland On Sunday waxed lyrical in his praise for the establishment, and declared that the only people who could possibly be opposed to such a great stride forward were those he derisively dismissed as “the rosary bead brigade”. But no convincing argument is ever offered to persuade us that we should view the sex industry as a good in itself; it is all based upon a knee-jerk reaction against Catholic moral teaching, and some specious blather about “adults” and “maturity”. In the meantime the sex industry itself gets away with murder (sometimes literally) and continues to exploit its slaves and dependants while thriving on the propaganda of its anti-Catholic and opinionated useful idiots in the media and in society generally.

It is boasted by the champions of the new Ireland that we Irish are now finally grown up, that we have become adults, etc. etc. etc. Melancholicus is far from convinced. If anything, Irish society has become even more adolescent and immature than at any time in the past. The Irish are increasingly a race of arrogant, lustful, avaricious and greedy souls, with a bad temper and a proclivity for profanity. Melancholicus invites his overseas readers to seek out a few Irish blogs (particularly those for whom the new Ireland is a good thing); just peruse the contents and see if you don’t agree with this assessment.

Ad orientem: the single most important reform

Melancholicus shares the view of Phil Lawler that turning the priest around again so that he celebrates Mass facing the direction he ought to be facing is the single most important change that might be made to the lex orandi of the Novus Ordo Missae.

There are a great many changes that Melancholicus would like to see made to his local parish Mass: the banishment of guitars, tambourines and other unsuitable musical instruments; the suppression of all those woefully inappropriate folksy “hymns”; the expulsion of musicians of any stripe from the sanctuary, and their relegation to the choir loft (which is where they should be in the first place); the abandonment of the damnable practice of using ‘girl altar boys’ as servers; the incineration of those shapeless off-white smocks that altar boys servers have been compelled to wear in place of soutane and surplice; an end to the practice of placing BOTH candles on the SAME side of the altar, as well as to reading the introductory rites of the Mass from the all-important chair instead of from the altar; the proscription of the dreadful 1970s ICEL translation of the Mass and its replacement with a language fitting for divine worship, preferably Latin but at the very least a solemn, hieratic English that elevates the minds of its hearers to the splendour of divine things; the suppression of the very banal offertory prayers in the Novus Ordo Missae and their replacement with texts that clearly express the mind of the Church during the offertory; the excision from the Missal of eucharistic prayer II; the scrapping of that silly rubric which instructs the priest to recite the Canon of the Mass in a clear and audible tone for the benefit of a human audience; the suppression of the ‘memorial acclamation’ after the consecration; the replacement of the current practice of having three readings (Old Testament + New Testament + Gospel) with two readings instead (Old Testament OR New Testament + Gospel), on top of which the so-called ‘responsorial psalm’ needs to be deleted from the liturgy as a matter of urgency; the revival of such laudable customs as knocking, bowing and genuflecting where these used to be done; the abolition of communion in the hand, as well as of the wretched extraordinary ministers; the revival of the ancient season of Septuagesima, or pre-Lent (this is topical, since this coming Sunday is in fact Septuagesima Sunday, but the vestments worn at Melancholicus’ local parish Mass will be green instead of violet, which will irritate him no end)...

Did I miss anything?

But out of all these changes, if I had to pick just one, it would be this: turn the priest around, so that he is facing the altar/tabernacle/east/almighty God again, instead of playing to the congregation. In my view, permitting Mass to be celebrated facing the people was the single most damaging liturgical innovation inflicted on the Church after the council. I can see it all the time, wherever the new rite is celebrated. Be he never so zealous for orthodoxy and liturgical correctness, if the celebrant is facing the people he will finish, despite his best intentions, by pitching the Mass to his audience instead of praying to almighty God. Many priests, brainwashed by the liturgical aberrations now fossilized within the new rite, consider the congregation to the be the most important ingredient in the affair, even to the extent of not bothering to celebrate Mass at all if there is no congregation present. Such a mentality could not have arisen if the practice of celebrating ad orientem had been maintained.

Plumbing the depths

When one severs the link between sexual activity and reproduction—as one does if one rejects the traditional Christian teaching on marriage and the family—two consequences invariably follow.

On the one hand, we have witnessed the rise of a pornographied and contraceptive culture characterised by unrestrained licentiousness, promiscuity, and convenience killing.

On the other hand, we see the creation of life increasingly transferred from the womb to the laboratory, a sinister move wherein the new life is subjected—all with the approval of government—to fiendish manipulations that violate the most foundational principles of ethics and humanity.

This blasphemy is just the beginning. They’ll be manufacturing the Uruk-Hai next.

Just wait and see.

The British public are, apparently, “at ease” with this abomination. Melancholicus is not in the least surprised, since western liberal societies have already swallowed so many camels that one more won’t hurt.

Or so they think.

The irrationality of the rationalists

This rather bizarre story from Catholic World News:

Angry scientists protest Pope's visit to Roman university

Vatican, Jan. 14, 2008 (CWNews.com) - A group of Italian academics have protested plans for a visit by Pope Benedict XVI to a leading university in Rome, charging that the Pope should not be honored in an academic setting because he has shown hostility toward scientific advance.

Some 67 professors signed a protest statement calling for cancellation of a visit by the Holy Father to La Sapienza university on January 17. Led by Andrea Frova, a physics professor at La Sapienza, the protesters said it would be "inappropriate" for an institution committed to scientific progress to honor the Pope, arguing that the Church has worked to suppress science.

To bolster their position, the 67 protesters cite a 1990 speech in which then-Cardinal Ratzinger defended the Church's disciplinary action against Galileo in 1633. In that talk, the future Pope cited the verdict of the agnostic scholar Paul Feyerabend, who said: "The Church in the age of Galileo clung to reason more than Galileo himself did." He found that the heresy verdict against Galileo was, by the standards of the times, "rational and just."

Although he did not endorse Feyerabend's conclusion -- Pope John Paul II had already acknowledged that the Church erred in condemning Galileo -- Cardinal Ratzinger did stress that the Church was not hostile to science, and in fact Galileo continued his investigations, with support from the hierarchy, even after his trial.

The thrust of Cardinal Ratzinger's speech in 1990 was to show how the Enlightenment era had created an artificial rift between faith and reason. He argued that the Galileo trial, "which was little considered in the 18th century, was elevated to a myth of the Enlightenment in the century that followed."

The protests against the Pope's visit to La Sapienza have echoed that hostility toward religious faith, claiming that the Church today still suppresses scientific progress. Ironically, to protest that alleged restraint on free inquiry, the group asked university officials to prevent a speech by the Roman Pontiff. Vatican Radio, describing the protests as unworthy of academic life, questioned whether the professors were displaying the "tolerance" that they proclaimed.

The dean of the university has said that he will not cancel the Pope's visit. But protests at the school are planned throughout the week, with critics posting anti-clerical slogans around the campus and organizing a "homo-cession" -- a parade of homosexuals and lesbians -- to protest Church teachings.

Yes, indeed! Academic life in a nutshell. Melancholicus can testify to this since he works in a university, rubbing shoulders all the time with academics. Without meaning to criticize his colleagues (many of whom have been most kind and beneficent to him, for which he is profoundly grateful) he must in all honesty state that he has found academia to be a veritable repository of everything that is small, mean, petty and narrow in human nature. The constant infighting, the rivalries, the petty jealousies, the endless slanders and libels, the mercenary politicking, not to mention the institutionalized leftism... it is all most unedifying, and this more than anything else has contributed to Melancholicus’ earnest desire to seek his living elsewhere, well away from faculty and classroom. He is aware that there is no escape from such things—they are endemic to human nature, and consequently may be found everywhere—but they seem truly to be writ large in the university.

Melancholicus was reminded of this fact upon seeing this reaction of the learned professors of La Sapienza to the proposed visit to their institute of our Holy Father, Benedict XVI. Here’s a little syllogism:

Major: Science will, in time, answer every question.
Minor: The Church is opposed to scientific progress.
Conclusion: Therefore the Church is opposed to truth, knowledge, reality, etc.

This, apparently, is how the good professors would seem view the matter. The conclusion follows logically from the premises, and so our professorial friends are quite confident in their stance. However, they have failed to notice (or perhaps have conveniently overlooked) that there are serious flaws in both premises which render the conclusion unsound.

Furthermore, if these good people were indeed truly enlightened, would they not welcome this opportunity to play host to such a significant leader of the benighted forces of superstition and obscurantism, in order that they might show him his errors before the whole world, and so correct him and all his followers, thereby leading them to the truth?

Instead they have chosen to respond with a petty and spiteful display of juvenility which does nothing to persuade this reviewer of the supposed ‘enlightened’ or ‘rational’ nature of this atheistic scientism. On the contrary, these gentlefolk seem to be just as superstitious and unquestioning as the most unthinking adherent of the most absurd religious cult.

The notion that the Church is somehow ‘opposed’ to scientific progress dies hard, but it owes more to the propaganda of the eighteenth-century ‘Age of Enlightenment’ than to real history. Scientists, it appears, make poor historians. Furthermore, what does the bizarre appearance of this proposed “homo-cession” have to do with science and the Church? The Church, at least, has from the beginning upheld a consistent attitude to homosexuality. Until recently, scientists were of the view, common to most members of society, that homosexuality was a disorder; today, influenced by the propaganda and the pressure of homosexual lobbyists, they have reversed their position. Now that they have succumbed to such activism, the findings of their science is dictated by their ideology. So what, in the end, is true? So much for objectivity. So much for the scientific method.

In any case, science as such does not enter the equation; it is all to do with a socio-political agenda and an opposition to the moral teachings of the Church, as well as the claims of the latter to be the custodian of divine revelation.

In any case, Melancholicus hopes that the Holy Father will not persevere with his intention to visit this impious university, for it seems that little good can come from it.

UPDATE: Melancholicus is relieved to note that the Holy Father has since cancelled his proposed visit to this seat of unwisdom. Deo gratias. Read about it here.

Busted!

Melancholicus is Thought Criminal #1451574.

A little risque in places, but well worth a visit, especially their section on Islam.

Enjoy!

The baby boomer death clock

Some readers may consider this curiosity to be in rather poor taste, but Melancholicus had a good hearty laugh at it in any case.

He found it courtesy of Traditio in Radice, which in the past while has been resurrected.

The good fellows over at TiR also quoted this most apposite verse from sacred scripture (Numbers 14:33), which has since become one of Melancholicus’ favourites:

“Your children shall wander in the desert forty years, and shall bear your fornication, until the carcasses of their fathers be consumed in the desert”.

And have we not indeed been wandering in the desert forty years, since the wretched ’sixties, and Vatican II?

Let us look for a moment at the legacy of the baby boomers. This is best seen in their children — the confused, self-absorbed and navel-gazing Generation X. Gen X has a high rate of nihilism, apathy, drug and alcohol problems, anxiety, depression and other mental disorders, a fondness for angry, depressive and discordant music, and of course a sky-high rate of suicide. Think of Kurt Cobain (born 1967), or Beck (born 1970), who in 1994 sang that immortal lyric Soy un perdedor / I’m a loser baby / so why don’t you kill me, or basically anything by The Smashing Pumpkins. The existential situation of Generation X, or at least the stereotype thereof, is truly pathetic. However, one must not be surprised that we (for Melancholicus, born in 1972, is himself a Gen X’er) have turned out this way, for Generation X has had to wander in the desert bearing the fornications and whoredoms of our baby boomer parents, and the hand of the LORD is heavy upon us. After all, the sacred liturgy was mutilated on the boomers’ watch, and they failed to do anything about it, preferring instead to bequeath to their children a wilderness of clown masses, guitar masses, liturgical dancing and other puerilities, and a Catholic faith so emptied of its credal and dogmatic content that it can hardly be called a religion any more. The boomers’ watch also saw the introduction of no-fault divorce, abortion, the rise of the so-called “gay rights” which have led to the normalisation of sodomy, and now that they are reaching their senectude and are safely ensconced in governments all over the world, the boomers themselves are legislating in favour of euthanasia, embryo research, homosexual ‘marriage’ and numberless other aberrations. Even while they continue to hammer violently down on the nails in the coffin of western civilisation, they lack the spine to do anything about the Mohammedan threat, which in Melancholicus’ view at least, is the gravest peril to face the free world since the Third Reich.

Alas, we must wait until the last members of that accursed generation have been lowered into the ground before a true restoration, unimpeded by the inverted ideology of the world of the ’sixties, can finally begin.

As a definitive and final judgement on the legacy of the baby boomers, Melancholicus is reminded of a line of a song routinely hummed by a character in the WWII novels of Sven Hassel whenever battle was about to be joined:

Come now death, come!

The Angelus bell on RTÉ

Another post for the benefit of overseas readers.

RTÉ (which stands for Radio Teilifís Éireann in Irish, meaning ‘Radio & Television of Ireland’) is Ireland’s national broadcasting company. Their website may be viewed here.

RTÉ began broadcasting in 1961. The first televised programme on RTÉ 1 was a Mass celebrated by the then archbishop of Dublin, the Most Rev. John Charles McQuaid, CSSp.

In those far-off days Irish people were generally devout and God-fearing, and the bishops could afford to throw their weight around, since the flock was invariably so docile and pliable. RTÉ also was prepared to acquiesce to the will of the bishops regarding the sort of programming which was considered acceptable viewing for the Irish public.

In the early days, certain things could not be shown on Irish television. These included programmes hostile to the Catholic religion as well as programmes featuring (among other things) nudity, sexual activity, unacceptably coarse language, an unreasonable level of violence, or anything that might be construed as promoting immorality.

One of the unique features of RTÉ radio and television at that time was that the sound of the Angelus bell was broadcast at noon and again at 6pm just before the evening news, chiming for one minute—about the time it takes to recite the Angelus if one is quick about it—before the beginning of the scheduled news bulletins. On the television the sound of the bell would be accompanied by an image of the Virgin and Child. Melancholicus is not aware of any other Catholic country in which this was done, although he is open to correction on this matter.

Today, most constraints on RTÉ programming have been removed. RTÉ television does not yet transmit hardcore pornography, but that’s about the only depth to which they have not yet stooped. RTÉ is today a fiercely anti-Catholic company, which has no problem broadcasting items which are offensive to Catholics, or items which promote foreign religions or ‘alternative’ spiritualities. The tone of religious programming on both radio and television is exceedingly slack, mostly of the interfaith mish-mash variety, and regularly features contributions from dissenters, scoffers, and nay-sayers. RTÉ has by now wholeheartedly embraced the New Ireland^TM of materialism, anti-clericalism, free love and gay rights.

In the midst of this sea-change, however, what is most remarkable is that the Angelus bell has survived. It still sounds on RTÉ radio 1 every day at noon and again at 6pm, and also on television on RTÉ 1 every evening before the six o’clock news. In a concession to the ‘ecumenical’ spirit of the times, the traditional Catholic image of the Virgin and Child has been replaced on television by a montage of images of persons engaged in various activities, none of which might have anything to do with the Catholic religion, but the Angelus is the Angelus nonetheless.

Given the exceedingly strong and visceral reaction by the bright young things of the New Ireland^TM against all things Catholic, the survival of the Angelus bell on RTÉ is a miracle in itself, for Melancholicus cannot account for it otherwise.

It is hard to imagine that it will not at a future date finally be withdrawn on the initiative of some secularising zealot or some self-appointed PC watchdog worried that the Angelus bell might be ‘offensive’ to religious minorities, but at present it remains, a nugget of spiritual tradition in the midst of an ocean of frenetic change.

The race for the US presidency

Overseas readers, and particularly Americans, might be interested to know how the current presidential campaign is being perceived here in Ireland.

This is soon told. RTÉ radio 1 and Newstalk 106, the two main ‘talkie’ stations in the Dublin area, have been religiously providing their listeners with all the latest news and in-depth analysis of the primaries, and are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Super Tuesday with breathless anticipation.

Melancholicus has noted one thing in particular about Irish coverage of American politics: the Irish are almost universally a race of Democrats. This of course is an age-old position, going back at least as far as the days of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, if not before. The political preferences of Irish communities in the United States seems to be mirrored exactly on the home sod. Witness the difference in the popular reception of visiting US presidents according as to whether they were Republicans or Democrats. When Bill Clinton visited Ireland in 1995, he was accorded the warmest of welcomes, with vast and appreciative crowds turning out to see him wherever he went. Ronald Reagan did not attract anything like similar numbers in 1984, but he did attract left-wing protesters hostile to US foreign policy in Latin America. When George W. Bush visited Ireland in 2004, he was greeted by a tiny crowd, most of whom had turned out to agitate, heckle and protest—as the reader must surely have expected.

Nobody on the Republican side has attracted much following in Ireland. Giuliani has been mentioned once or twice. There has also been plenty of media snickering at the religious beliefs of certain Republican candidates (Romney and Huckabee particularly). Contrary to popular foreign perception, ‘Holy Catholic Ireland’ is nothing of the sort. Melancholicus’ patria is a rigidly secular land. The Ireland of today is a staunchly anti-religious and even anti-Catholic country. Should Benedict XVI visit Ireland (as has been threatened), he is sure to receive a grand reception, but hardly on the same scale as John Paul II in 1979 (to date the only papal visit to this country). The so-called ‘religious right’ in the USA has no sympathy in Ireland.

Although John McCain’s name has been dropped on a few occasions, all the Irish news coverage at the time of writing concerns Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and the excitement of the contest between these two for the Democratic nomination. Most Irish people seem to support either one or the other. In tune with liberal notions of gender and race, many are excited by the possibility that this campaign will yield either the first black or first female US president, as if such superficialities were the only thing that counts.

Not being either American or resident in the US, Melancholicus has no vested interest one way or the other. The Republicans do not in his estimation deserve to retain the White House, but on the other hand the Democrats are a crew of pro-gay, anti-life liberal ideologues. I suppose it matters little whether Tiberius Caesar is succeeded by Caligula, Nero, or Domitian; the effect in each case will be much the same.

Without comment

Jesuits — the grim statistics of decline:

World-wide: Before Vatican II, 36,200. Today 18,711.

Brothers: Before Vatican II, 5,204. Today 1,306.

Seminarians (USA only): Before Vatican II, 5,500. Today 140.

USA Jesuit priests: Before Vatican II, 8,000. Today 2,640.

Jesuits (Italy): Before Vatican II, 4,000+. Today 640.

Jesuits (France): Before Vatican II, 3,500+. Today less than 500.

Jesuits (Canada): Before Vatican II, 1,500+. Today less than 250.

Jesuits (Ireland and the United Kingdom): Before Vatican II, 1,740+. Today less than 300.

How the mighty have fallen!

H/T to Gillibrand.

O Virgo Virginum

O VIRGO VIRGINUM, quomodo fiet istud? quia nec primam similem visa es, nec habere sequentem. Filiae Ierusalem, quid me admiramini? Divinum est mysterium hoc quod cernitis.

O Virgin of virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? The thing which ye behold is a divine mystery.

YES! I finally found it - the Latin text and music for the ‘eighth’ O Antiphon, O Virgo Virginum. A bit late, seeing as Sapientiatide is now well behind us, but late is better than never.



This ‘eighth’ O antiphon is not used in the Roman rite proper, only in the Sarum use thereof. I have it in English in my copies of the English Office and the Anglican Breviary, but have been searching for the original Latin for some time now. This happy discovery I owe to a chance visit to the Inn at the End of the World.

Because the Sarum use contains eight O antiphons, Sapientiatide begins a day earlier than in the Roman rite, on December 16th.