woman

Family Targeted

Family Targeted on September 21, 2019

As the world turns its back more and more on God, so He gently withdraws for the moment – He will come back in force, wait for it! – but in the meantime there is steadily disappearing with Him His divine protection upon His own seedbed for human beings, the family. Gravest of all is the abandoning of the family by the Catholic churchmen, leaving it wide open to attack from all sides by Satan. Most hurtful must be when the attack comes from within, by beloved family members. Here below is such a case, and it has to be typical of many today. The family father writes:—

With my wife we had ten children, three of whom are now adults, and we had gone through some difficult times and a few tragedies, but now she has declared war on me. About 18 months ago, fully supported by her Novus Ordo priest and powerful friends, she undertook legal maneuvers to get me out of the home, and away from the children. It was all unbelievable, and terribly painful. That the persecution was essentially religious was confirmed when she offered to let me stay at home as a separated man, living in the basement, if only I signed a legal agreement relinquishing any religious rights over the education and formation of my children, and precluding us all from going to any Traditional chapel and/or from communicating with any so-called Traditionalists. Of course, I could not sign that, and her group went on to totally roll over me and the kids with legal tricks . . . and I lost everything: wife, home, children, money, car, health insurance, and almost entirely my business. As my children were strong in the faith, and would not yield to Mom’s bizarre and wrong behaviour and preferred to be with Dad, then she got a team of “therapists” to “wash out” their brains, and get them to be “normal” again, and she got them into Novus Ordo schools and forced them to attend the Novus Ordo Mass with her.

It’s been well over a year since I last saw my little children. The youngest is now almost 3 years old, and the rest of the younger children are 18–24 months apart, up to 16. I have no way to find out what’s going on with them, and whether they are keeping the faith, because they aren’t allowed to see or hear anybody other than Novus Ordo liberals. The three older ones, adults now, have been able to communicate with me and to remain as close as they can. The oldest one, who was already in a seminary and had finished philosophy, got out, perhaps due to the shock caused by the family break-up, but he keeps his faith intact, attends Mass almost daily, and works well in the world. Sadly, #2 swallowed the poison that college is the only way to make a living in the future. The third one is now debating the idea of going to college, but has not lost sight of God’s Will.

I can see that God has a plan, and that my own faults and flaws have played their part in the break-up. Years ago a Traditional priest told me that we had such a Catholic family that the devil surely hated us. This is surely a furious attack from Satan to destroy the faith of my children, and to lead me to despair, but my faith is still strong, and I hope that through this ordeal some, many, or all of us will be saved. Still, there is more pain than joy in my heart. We used to be a good example for other families, but now we are objects of pity and derision . . . and I’m being blamed for being “fanatic,” mentally-ill, inflexible, and so forth. Had I not known many souls committed to the true faith, explaining and denouncing the current evils in Church and world, I would have agreed with my wife and her entourage, and I would have gone along with the easy, comfortable, secular way of life. But I do remain weak, and so sometimes I do wonder if Tradition isn’t all insanity – how can such a small remnant of Catholics be right? Yet, there were only 12 Apostles in the beginning, and one of them was a traitor.

Such a reaction from a mother of ten is not normal, but today what is normal? So how can a father defend his family against such a reaction? Prevention is better than cure, says the proverb. Whoever it is in the family that Satan is targeting, the family Rosary every day must be the first line of defence. Beyond that, “What can’t be cured, must be endured,” as this Catholic father realizes. We must trust God.

Kyrie eleison.

Priceless Femininity – II

Priceless Femininity – II on October 13, 2018

The womanliness of woman is today under fierce attack. The reason is not far to seek. Satan wants complete power over mankind so as to make sure that every single soul falls into Hell. Now the way in which Almighty God designs for human beings to set out on the road to Heaven is by their birth within a normal human family, in which what we call today the “biological father” and the “biological mother” look after the fruit of their mutual love, their own children. Dr Henry Makow takes up the story from last week’s “Eleison Comments,” from the standpoint of the Satanists.

“Cabalist Jews and Freemasons are Satanists. They control by degrading and corrupting. Like termites they eat away at the supporting columns of society. The family is the red blood cell of a healthy society. It provides us with our roles and identity, as well as necessary emotional and material support. It ensures the young are born, loved and raised properly, and the aged are taken care of. Our family is our link in the chain of eternity. So the Satanists have always wanted to destroy it. They went after the women, whom they deemed fickle, vain and feeble-minded. ‘There is no way of influencing men so powerfully as by means of the women,’ Adam Weishaupt wrote. ‘These should therefore be our chief study; we should insinuate ourselves into their good opinion, give them hints of emancipation from the tyranny of public opinion, and of standing up for themselves; it will be an immense relief to their enslaved minds to be freed from any one bond of restraint, and it will fire them the more, and cause them to work for us with zeal without knowing that they do so; for they will only be indulging their own desire of personal admiration.’

“So the Satanists convinced women that marriage and family were ‘oppressive.’ Men may have toiled in factories and died in war to provide and protect, but somehow women were the ones oppressed. Satanists needed to interfere with the natural affection and attraction that males and females have for each other, and for their offspring. Satanists exist to banish love. A woman’s essence is love, the power to generate love, by loving and being loved in return. This is the source of her power. A woman’s love for her husband and children is the most precious thing in the world. For a man, this love is his greatest treasure. By allowing herself to be deceived, by pursuing material instead of spiritual power, modern woman has essentially lost the power to love. She can have power or love. She cannot have both. Women need a man’s love like a flower needs sunshine and water. Men nurture women and women empower men by acquiescing to their reasonable demands. This is the heterosexual dynamic [ . . . ]

“But this is what is condemned as the exploitation of woman (the ‘eroticisation of powerlessness’) by, for example, a Sheila Jeffreys, known as a lesbian feminist scholar and political activist. Obviously she cannot understand that woman’s love is her true power. She wants to turn all women into lesbians who like her cannot understand that woman’s style, beauty and charm, in brief her femininity, depend on eschewing material power. A woman who gives herself to her husband is cherished and loved by him and their children. A woman who pursues power in masculine terms is doomed to a life of isolation and bitterness.

“Western feminists, you have forfeited your most precious gift for nothing. You are vulgar, a real turn-off. You lack personality, charm, style, substance. You cannot love. You are not even attractive. And soon you will lose your youth. You will have nothing but your job, your dog and your equally desperate friends. Western feminists, you have been robbed, betrayed by your society, teachers, and political and cultural leaders; and consequently you have joined their traitorous ranks. You have betrayed your unborn children, your culture, your family and the promise of the future. But worst of all, you have betrayed yourselves” (end of Makow quote).

Kyrie eleison.

Priceless Femininity – I

Priceless Femininity – I on October 6, 2018

It is where the soldiers of a besieging army are pouring over the walls that the defenders need to fight. It is where the salvation of souls is being most hindered that servants of God must most fight. That is why these “Comments” and the “Rector’s Letters” that went before them come back often to the unwomaning of women and to the unmanning of men. God’s complementary design of man and woman, going back to Adam and Eve, is basic to human nature and life. And when that design is torn up by man and supposedly thrown away by the foul manipulations of “gender” and so on, how can the supernatural grace of God come in to land within human natures so radically fouled up? And without grace, where do they finish?

In theory, Catholic womenfolk should not have too great difficulty in understanding and accepting how God designed them. In practice, the pro-feminist propaganda is so relentless in today’s abject education and vile media that even Catholic women’s natural instincts and God-given sense of their true role in life are often overwhelmed by the thrust of pride towards seeming power. Here are some rough but wise words on woman, from Irene Claremont de Castillejo, Knowing Woman: Feminine Psychology:—

“Any girl who grows to womanhood without knowing that love is her supreme value has been spiritually raped. Feminine spirituality expresses an attitude of spiritual waiting, and tending, and readiness for the meeting with its opposite which is a prerequisite for woman’s inner wholeness. Without this she becomes a prey to the masculine within herself, a raging spirit of intellectual or physical activity to which no man can be related, and to which she can in no way relate herself. She is a woman possessed.”

And then from Henry Makow, Ph.D., Western Women Have Lost Their Power to Love (revised):—

“Western women have been tricked into pursuing power instead of love. Paradoxically, they have never been so powerless. They want to be loved but no longer have love to offer in exchange. In the movie War Games from 1983, the hero, Matthew Broderick, is a computer whiz-kid who accidentally starts a nuclear countdown and races to avert catastrophe. His girlfriend, played by Ally Sheedy, is seen in a complementary role, basically helping, encouraging and admiring him. He is the leader. But her presence informs, validates and heightens everything he does. It’s as though his actions are dedicated to her. This is the way heterosexuality works. Woman empowers man by entrusting her power to her husband. This is how woman loves, i.e. by ‘trusting,’ enlisting as First Mate to his Captain. If this movie were remade today, she would be Captain, he would be emasculated, and they would break up.

“From Chaucer to Freud, men have asked, ‘What do women want?’ It’s really quite simple. They want to be loved. Specifically, they want the passionate lifelong love of a husband. But what makes a man love a woman in this way? Her sacrifice. By throwing her lot in with his, by accepting his leadership, and by serving him and their children. In other words, lasting love is earned by deeds. It is not based on sex appeal (which wanes) or witty comebacks. It is built on bonds of GRATITUDE.

“By teaching women to be self-seeking instead of self-sacrificing, Feminism has deprived them of their stock-in-trade, love. All they have left to give is the act of marriage without marriage. Because they won’t surrender to a loving husband, they’re reduced to giving themselves to strangers.” (End of Makow quote.)

“But, Your Excellency, where are the Captains? Where are the potential loving husbands who will lead? The men today are wash-outs, not excluding the Traditional Catholics!” Girls, just like you have been de-feminised without your realising it, so they have been emasculated, by today’s whole wretched culture. You must pray, because God can easily find you a young man. Pray to St Anne, as above, but first of all, promise her that if she finds you a man, you are ready and willing to submit to him. That way she will be rather more inclined to search for you. Then twist her arm. Heaven does not mind that – Lk XVIII, 2–8.

Kyrie eleison.

Tomato Stakes – II

Tomato Stakes – II on November 12, 2011

When “Eleison Comments” quoted (Sept. 10, 217) the Russian proverb likening woman and man to a tomato-plant and the stake around which that plant clings and climbs to bear fruit, it used the comparison to expound on the nature and role of woman. A woman reader then asked how it applies to men. Alas, our crazy age is trying to wipe out all these basics of human nature.

On God’s design for man and woman, profoundly different but sublimely complementary, there is of course much more to be said than a mere comparison from the garden can say. At every Catholic wedding Mass, the Epistle compares the relations between husband and wife to those between Christ and his Church. Worthy of note in this passage (Ephesians V, 22–33) is how St Paul lays out at length the consequent duties of the husband, briefly those of the wife. Already we may suspect that today’s men are greatly responsible for the loss of sanity between contemporary man and woman, but let us leave the supernatural mystery for another occasion and return to the garden, because it is above all the natural basics that are being attacked today by the enemies of God and man.

For a tomato-stake to serve a tomato-plant it needs two things: it must stand tall and it must stand firm. If it does not stand tall, the plant cannot climb, and if it does not stand firm the plant cannot cling, or wrap itself around the stake. The firmness, one might say, depends on a man’s wrapping himself around his work, while the tallness depends upon his reaching for God, no less.

As for the firmness, in all times and places where human nature has not been twisted out of all recognition, the man’s life revolves around his work while the woman’s life revolves around her family, starting with her man. If the man makes the woman the centre of his life, it is as though two tomato plants were clinging together – both will finish in the mud, unless the woman takes on the part of the man, which she was never meant to do, and which she should at least never wish to do. A wise woman chooses for husband precisely a man who has found his work and loves it, so that while he is firmly wrapped around it, she can wrap herself around him.

As for the tallness, just as the stake must point to the sky, so a man must reach for Heaven. Leaders need a vision with which to inspire and lead. Archbishop Lefebvre had a vision of the restoration of the true Church. Similarly when the faith of Cardinal Pie (1815–1880) saw unmanliness in the men of the 19th century all around him, he attributed it to their lack of faith. Where there is no faith, he said, there are no convictions. No convictions, no firmness of character. No firmness of character, no men. St Paul was thinking along the same lines when he said, “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (I Cor.XI, 3). Therefore to recover his manliness, let a man turn to God, put himself in order beneath him, and it will be that much easier for a wife to put herself in order beneath her man, and the children beneath both of them.

But “beneath” is not to be understood as any kind of tyranny, either of husband over wife, or of parents over children. The stake is there for the tomato. It was a wise Jesuit who said that the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother. Men do not run on love as women do, so they can easily fail to understand how women need to love and to be loved. In fact, a teaspoonful of affection, and she is good for another hundred miles. The Holy Ghost says it rather more elegantly: “Husbands, love your wives and be not bitter towards them” (Col.III, 19).

Kyrie eleison.

Tomato Stakes – I

Tomato Stakes – I on September 10, 2011

A little while back a family wife and mother told me she was having a hard time communicating with her husband. They could hardly talk to one another about what was going wrong without ending up mad at each other. Rightly or wrongly, I sensed that her problem was this universal, deliberate and diabolical denial of the marvellously complementary role designed by God for man and woman in marriage. Here is what I wrote for her. She said it helped her. May it help others. By the way, ladies, I do NOT think all the problem is on your side!

I am sorry to hear of a rough passage in your marriage. Rule number One: never argue with your husband in front of, or within earshot of, the children. They come first. You cannot help the family by pulling down your husband, or arguing with him in front of them. On the contrary.

Rule number Two: RESPECT your husband, even if he may not always deserve it. Women run on love, men on ego, a huge difference. That is why St Paul – WORD OF GOD – says, “Wives, obey your husbands, husbands, cherish your wives.” Huge difference! In any marriage where the husband shows love for his wife and where the wife respects her husband, normally the essence of a contented marriage is there. And if he does not show love for you, at least make yourself lovable, which you will never do by fighting with him.

Let it cost you what it may, respect your husband. He needs your respect more than he needs your love. You need his love more than you need his respect. Obey him. Never show that you are telling him what to do. Get him to decide to do what you want him to do. And for the wife to work outside the home is not a good thing, especially if she earns more than he does. If you have to earn, and do earn more, NEVER let it show. Disguise the fact. A man needs to see himself as the breadwinner, as the head of the house. You are the heart, just as necessary as the head for the family, maybe more so, but you are not the head. And if you are sometimes forced to act as the head, do not let it show, BUT DISGUISE IT.

I would be surprised if you could not make the marriage work. It usually depends on the woman to adapt herself to the man, and not the other way round. Russian proverb –“As the tomato plant is to the stake (around which it climbs),so the woman is to the man.” If he is not a stake, do all you can to make him into one. And if you cannot, then once more disguise the fact. God makes women more adaptable than men, so that they will adapt to their men.

You once said that the family needed money to educate the children. Has it occurred to you that the best and most important education of your girls is in their mother’s kitchen? Assuming that the mother is at home. You have much more to give your girls by your example than any school outside the home can give them. And give them the precious example of a wife and mother that obeys and respects her husband despite everything. Children are very observant. Your example is of crucial importance for the happiness of their future marriages and homes.

Argue with your husband if you like, but quietly, respectfully, and away from the children. And do not say, “I too have been out working all day long, I too need understanding at home.” For mothers to work outside the home is not normal, and the men sense it, even if it is their own fault. Men are what they are. This is the man that God appointed for you to marry. Give your children the example of respecting him. That is a precious gift, especially to your girls. All families today need a lot of prayer. Mother of God, help!

Kyrie eleison.

Men’s Authority

Men’s Authority on May 28, 2011

Two young men, uncertain of getting married, begged me the other day to write a manual on how men should be men. Theirs was a real cry of distress: “When should we be nice with women, and when should we be firm? We just don’t know any longer!” Yesteryear the answer to that question was common sense for many a man, but authority today has been so widely undermined by liberal propaganda that the problem of exercising it in marriage may be one reason why now numbers of young folk prefer simply to live together rather than get married. What follows is not a manual, but it may at least point our two musketeers in the right direction.

St. Paul says: “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. III, 14,15). In other words all fatherhood or authority amongst God’s creatures is modelled upon and derives from the fatherhood and authority of God himself. As Dostoevsky has one of his characters say, “If God does not exist, then I have no business being an army officer.” So it stands to reason that if men chase God out of their society, as he is being chased today out of the whole wide world, then all authority is radically undermined. In the individual, reason will be unable to govern the passions, in the family the father will be unable to control his household, and in the State democracy will come to seem the only legitimate form of government.

Now within the family, who, observing daily life, can deny that men are stronger than women in the use of reason, while women are stronger than men in intuition and emotion? Watch any sitcom if you doubt it. Now feelings have their rightful place in life and they are scorned, like one’s wife, at one’s peril, but they come and go, they are unstable and as such they are a guide, but not a reliable guide, to action. On the contrary if reason discerns what is objectively true and just, it is stabilized by the fact that objective truth and justice are above any individual or his feelings. Therefore reason may listen to feelings, but it must rule them. That is why men have, as men, a natural authority possessed only exceptionally by women, who have as a rule other qualities. That is why the man is naturally the head of the family and home, while the woman is naturally its heart.

But the liberalism which rules the modern world dissolves all sense of objective truth or justice. By so doing it deprives the reason of its object, and of its objective anchor in a reality above and independent of the reasoning subject. Reason being the prerogative of men, liberalism hits the men before it hits the women, whose feminine instincts are not dependent on reason. By the same token liberalism undercuts the authority of men which comes down from conforming to what is above them, ultimately divine Truth and Justice, and it makes all use of authority become arbitrary.

Therefore, young men, in all your dealings with men or women, seek to be true and just, and turn to God for the help necessary to discern truth and justice amidst so much untruth and injustice and arbitrary misuse of authority all around us today. Then act upon what you discern, and you will re-build your manly authority from above, in a world undercutting it from below. In brief, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt. VI, 33).

Kyrie eleison.