We apologise for the delay in this posting. The delay has been occasioned by what is called the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) which causes one’s computer to crash without warning and which, for the relatively amateur computer user, becomes a repetitive nightmare. As we write it is still unresolved.
Trojan Horses
If anyone is in any doubt about the strength of masonic/secular humanist influence in the United Kingdom, one has only to reflect on the reaction to the so-called ‘Trojan-horse’ affair in Birmingham State Schools – an affair which has arisen because of an alleged plot by Islamists to make certain public schools in Birmingham conform to an Islamic ethos. Some of these schools have a population which is well over 90% Muslim and reflect the areas in which they are situated. This in turn has led to calls by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, among others, calling for British Schools to instil British values in all British schools. Defining such values by some has not been too difficult. They include fair play, democracy, respect for the rule of law (unless it is seen as God’s law), tolerance (unless one happens to disagree with same-sex ‘marriage’) regard for the Queen, weather watching, cricket, soccer and fish and chips etc. But the essence of ‘British values’ is seen to be tolerance.
In the Catholic sphere toleration is to endure an evil for the greater good. In the masonic/secular humanist sphere toleration is understood as a catch all to prevent the imposition of dogma per se without regard to its veracity, and to prevent the assertion of objective truths while at the same time giving free reign to all manner of secular dogma or secular ‘truths’ which are held to be self-evident because liberals proclaim them to be so; the principal dogma being that there is no such thing as objective truth. Liberals (and we include the adherents of all the mainstream political parties within this definition) will decry Muslim attempts to teach their children the fundamentals of Islam, especially in the setting of a State school, because the purpose of a State school is not to impart religious belief but rather to teach dogmatically those ‘undogmatic’ British values. Now we are aware, no less than liberals, of the dangers of children being indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islamic principles which are extremely intolerant, especially of Christian or other ‘infidel’ beliefs. But, as Peter Hitchens points out elsewhere these things should have been thought about before mass Muslim immigration to an ostensibly Christian Britain was permitted. Any sensible Christian State would at least have given consideration to the long term effects of same.
But in the absence of any attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity (which would today be regarded as the worst example of Islamophobia) our society is now attempting to convert them to undefined liberal ‘British values’. No self-respecting devout Muslim, however, would feel comfortable in adopting the current liberal and permissive de facto values of British society, and one can well understand Muslim attempts to uphold their own moral principles. Perhaps their fault was to do so in the context of a State school rather than in their own educational establishments.
Nevertheless, this ‘Trojan Horse’ within secular state schools presented an opportunity for the usual suspects to attack faith schools in general. One imagines that truly Catholic schools which sought to instil the unreconstructed social and moral teaching of the Church in their pupils would be equally abhorrent in the eyes of the liberal establishment. On the BBC’s This Week, that avowed liberal ‘conservative’ Michael Portillo opined that that the problems in Northern Ireland would not be solved while ‘Faith schools’ remain. Perhaps in another 20 or thirty years a similarly ‘enlightened’ politician will place the blame for divisiveness in Britain on ‘faith schools’ too (if such still exist) rather than upon the mass immigration or planting of a foreign culture in a relatively homogenous state – which was the cause too of the ‘problems’ in Ireland.
Kerr’s Musings
Santa Claus (ewitz)
In this musing Charles Kerr considers clerical celibacy in the light of Clausewitz’s policy of concentration of force and concentration on the objective.
Cohesion and Disintegration in the war for Iraq
I could not help but recall with a certain irony the British Government’s alarm at the number of young Muslims rallying to the call of Jihad in Syria, Iraq and other conflict areas in the Muslim world. No doubt MI5 have kept files on each and every one of them as they did of those Britons who departed in the 1930s to fight in the International Brigades in Spain – Indeed I have a copy of that list upon which my late father’s name appears. Irony, because I read this week that the British, at one stage, sought to train over 100,000 Syrian opponents of the Assad regime. No doubt all of these British trained “freedom-fighters” would have been “good” Muslims – of the type which embraces Western values of democracy, women’s rights etc. None of these I am sure would have been tempted to join ISIS or any of the other warring parties in the Syrian-Iraqi field of conflict or perhaps, as Muggeridge once suggested, we should tell that to the Marines.
In the attached article, Dr Brian Downing gives an appraisal of the forces now at play in Iraq and in the new Caliphate established in the ruins of Iraq and Syria. (Click here to access)
Vietnam – another perspective
In a recent article in the Spectator, Damian Thompson, highlighted the role of Buddhist monks in the persecution of Muslims in Burma and Sri Lanka. As Thompson observes, liberals view this development with sorrow as they are ‘still piously attached to the notion that the true message of all religions is “peace”’. As a teenager, I remember those news reports of ‘peaceful’ Buddhist monks immolating themselves in protest during the Vietnam war. Even then Buddhists were viewed as the archetypes of peaceful religion and of apolitical protest, but then, as until now, it was convenient for them to be treated thus as their protests were harnessed to the liberal cause.
In the attached article, ‘Giving a Free hand to the Assassins’ r Robert Hickson, examines again, in the light of Marguerite Higgin’s book ‘Our Vietnam Nightmare’, the events surrounding the assassination of the Catholic president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, in which a ‘politically active, subversive faction of anti-Diem Buddhist monks’ played no little part, aided and abetted by the Catholic president of the United States and his officials.
Perverse Public policy
‘Within Curriculum for Excellence Sexual Health and Relationships education is conflated with Parenthood and the only section where discussion of sexual intercourse is required reads: “I am able to describe how human life begins and how a baby is born,” implying that the main function of sexual intercourse is procreative. Sexual intercourse does not usually occur in the context of procreation; it occurs in the context of enjoyment and mechanisms are often used to ensure that procreation does not occur. Young people are likely to be aware of this. Therefore sex and relationships education should taught in the context of enjoyment and should be decoupled from parenthood.’ (Taken from the response by the Highland Council and NHS Highland on 7th February 2013 to the Scottish Government’s inquiry into teenage pregnancy in Scotland.
‘It is a characteristic common to all the [sexual] perversions that in them reproduction as an aim is put aside. This is actually the criterion by which we judge whether a sexual activity is perverse: if it departs from reproduction in its aims and pursues the attainment of gratification independently.’ Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London: Allen and Unwin 1952) p.266.
Brent Bozell
In this reflective essay Dr. Robert Hickson recalls the life and times of his friend Brent Bozell, the editor and founder of Triumph Magazine and some of the characters and events which shaped his life. Bozell was a great Catholic convert who for a part of his life sought in Spain the Catholicity he could not find in his native land. But as Dr. Hickson relates, in his account of an ill-conceived attempt to prepare new Carlist requetes for a possible post-Franco civil war, even stalwart Spanish Catholic Carlists had to admit that ‘we are even unable to pass the Faith onto our children’ – a calamitous effect of the post-conciliar era. Bozell’s battle against the forces of evil, whether communism, liberalism or contraception and abortion was uncompromising. Dr Hickson records here his profound appreciation of Bozell and his Catholic soul.
Transubstantiation, Modernism and Ecumenism
In the shadow of the feast of Corpus Christi we have reproduced Chapter 5 from Fr John McKee’s work, The Enemy Within the Gate – The Catholic Church and Renascent Modernism. That chapter entitled ‘Transubstantiation’ (Click here to access) gives us an insight into the troubles which beset the Church in the immediate period around the Second Vatican Council. Fr McKee suggests that Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Mysterium Fidei which was published a few days before the opening of the last session of Vatican II had, because of that, an air of forestalling discussion. The type of discussion it sought to forestall can be found by reading Fr McKee’s account. The encyclical may have forestalled discussion at the Council but it did not forestall discussion elsewhere. This exposé from the Sixties and Seventies indicates clearly the doctrinal mayhem to which Catholics were subjected in that period, and the results of which continue until this day. The lack of respect for the Blessed Sacrament, whether intentional or unintentional, arising from communion-in-the-hand, from displaced tabernacles, from cursory or non-existent acknowledgement of the Real Presence can be traced back to this time and the rampant Modernism which existed then and which led to the Catechetical malformation of a whole generation through the agency of the infamous Dutch Catechism.
Fr McKee indicates that ecumenism was the spur for this modernist approach. But even the most modernist Catholic would surely find it difficult to find common cause with the Eucharistic theology of the Anglican Vicar, the Reverend Adrian Fisher who died in April of this year. The Rev. Fisher whose claim to fame, at least according to his obituary in The Times (6th June, 2014), was the role he played in the affair of Fethard-on-Sea in Eire which featured in the film, A Love Divided. The film was about Catholic reaction to a Protestant mother who reneged on her promise to send the children of her mixed-marriage to a Catholic school. But it is not that affair we wish to record but rather his understanding of communion. His obituary records:
After leaving Fethard in 1962 he rejoined the army as a chaplain and later worked as a priest in Oxfordshire. In his leisure time he undertook biblical research in his summerhouse, with Rosie, his beloved Labrador, at his feet. The high court judge, Sir Christopher French, a one-time parishioner of Fisher’s, once brought his jack Russell with him to a communion service. Unphased on seeing a dog with paws on the altar rail, Fisher popped a communion wafer into its mouth, and touched its head, saying as he did so “bless thee, my dog”.
John Knox had rodents in mind more than dogs as recipients in his mockery of transubstantiation, describing the consecrated Host as ‘prey to rats and mice; for they will desire no better dinner than white round gods anew’ and, adds ‘it is but a feeble and miserable god’ that can be destroyed ‘by a bold and powerful mouse.’ (David Laing, The Works of John Knox, Vol 6, p.172-173) But would even Knox have treated a Presbyterian communion bread as did Fisher the Anglican ‘communion wafer’?
Harts Catholic Doctrine
Herewith Chapter XII – Second Article of the Creed – ( ‘And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord’)
The Charismatic Movement
Recently, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury visited Rome accompanied by the Rev. Nicky Gumbel described by the Catholic Herald as ‘vicar of the world-famous Anglican charismatic Church Holy Trinity Brompton. The Editor of the Catholic Herald (20th June 2014) then waxes lyrical about the visit:
‘It was an inspired idea of Archbishop Justin Welby to take his old friend on his latest visit to Rome. It is under Mr Gumbel’s stewardship that 15 million people, including many Catholics, have undertaken the Alpha Course, HTB’s carefully structured introduction to Christianity. Not only that, but Mr Gumble has forged alliances with Catholic evangelists on every continent. There is more than one way to make ecumenism work. Instead of holding sadly but inevitably fruitless discussions about the ordination of women, HTB and its Catholic partners roll up their sleeves and spread the news of salvation through Jesus Christ. Their work had captured the imagination of Pope Francis, himself a roller-up of sleeves…’
Clearly the editor of the Catholic Herald has not read or has chosen to ignore the warnings expressed by Gillian van der Lande in her study Alpha – Seeing Alpha in a Catholic Light which demonstrates clearly the Protestant ethos of the Alpha course.
However, the Pope himself has expressed support for the Catholic Charismatic movement in a recent address to participants in the 37th National Convocation of the Renewal in the Holy Spirit on 1st June 2014, and went so far as to state: ‘You, the charismatic renewal, have received a great gift from the Lord. Your movement’s birth was willed by the Holy Spirit to be “a current of grace in the Church and for the Church”. This is your identity: to be a current of grace.
In the light of these recent indications of support for Charismatic renewal we have provided a copy of a study on the Catholic Charismatic movement by Fr Scott Gardiner which first appeared in The Angelus Magazine in 1998.