Western civilization

LATIN and GREEK

LATIN and GREEK on March 23, 2024

Good education is not far to seek – 

That which is tried and tested? – Latin and Greek.

The value of the pre-Christian classics in Catholic education is a disputed question. For instance one famous anti-liberal Catholic of the 19th century, Monsignor Gaume, argued that the classic authors in Latin and Greek are too impure to be usable in Catholic schools, but that would seem to be an exaggeration. For purposes of education at the natural level there is too much real value in the Latin and Greek classics for them to be absolutely spurned. The Greek and Latin classics are the products of intelligent and serious men who have thought a good deal about life and who present, by the gift of God, much truth concerning life and human nature. True, the impurities are scattered all around but they are not the centrepiece, rather a sideshow. An outstanding example would be the Aeneid of Virgil which maintains such a high moral level, that it was consulted widely at the height of the Middle Ages for its lofty vision of life. 

In brief, the Christian society is supernaturally superior to the society of the ancient classics, but that old classic society is far superior naturally to degenerate modern society. From the standpoint of education, it is especially easy to argue for the all-round superiority of Latin and Greek, as opposed to an education in modern languages or the modern sciences. A good education will provide both discipline for the youngsters’ hearts and minds, and culture for their souls, and history for their lives. Latin and Greek alone provide all three, Latin providing the practice of the basics, and Greek their theory. 

DISCIPLINE: Latin is an extremely logical language, requiring much thought to disentangle: subject, verb, object, and so on. There is discipline also in learning Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Computing and Technology, etc., but everything there is material, determined, inhuman, precisely and proudly abstracting from anything spiritual, free or human. And what the youngsters can no longer longer learn in school, or from their grandparents or even parents, they have to pick up in the gutter, from Hollywood or the Internet or their smartphone, etc. Lucky if they have just one sports coach who is human! In the spiritual wasteland of a “scientific” education, how much influence for good such a mere coach can have. 

CULTURE: When it comes to educating and forming the hearts and souls of the youngsters (hearts and souls they do have, with imperious needs), then the “sciences” enumerated above are simply non-starters, while the modern languages are a second best, because all modernity since the “Reformation” and its culture are more or less stained with apostasy, with war on God. Of course Latin and Greek culture are not free of original sin, but they are uniquely free of the Reformation and all its consequences, presenting a simpler and purer vision of the basics of human nature and life. A great help for youngsters to know. 

HISTORY: Latin and Greek culture are embedded in the history of all Western civilisation as it is now too late for the culture of any other language to be. Latin and Greek were two of the three languages nailed to the Cross of Our Lord. Greek was the language of the New Testament. Rome was soon the centre of the Church. “History is the master of life” is a wise old proverb, and to learn Latin and Greek is necessarily to learn some Greek and Roman history. In 1984 George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” So whoever controls our schools today, controls our future. These people are presently hard at work, discounting Latin and Greek, making history start with World War II, which is much more easily manipulated than ancient history. What does that tell us about modern education? It is no good. It is shaping sheep for the Antichrist. 

Kyrie eleison 

Sorcerers Control?

Sorcerers Control? on October 28, 2017

In a recent interview the Managing Director of Mercedes Benz, a state-of-the-art German firm for the production of high quality motor cars, painted a picture of mankind’s near future in which computer software will disrupt most traditional industries, and in which their own main competitors will no longer be other motor car firms but Google, Apple and Amazon! Law, he says, nursing, car driving, insurance, real estate will all be substantially affected by computers. By 2027 10% of everything produced will be 3D printed. By 2037 70 to 80% of jobs will disappear. Cheap smart-phones will make world class education available worldwide, and so on, and so on. But such dramatic predictions need to be put in their place, which is secondary. Machines are only machines, and computers are only machines.

It is ever since the Industrial Revolution broke out over mankind in the 18th and 19th centuries that men began to wonder what the inhuman machines meant for the future of human beings. Since then many a wise observer has raised serious doubts as to the ultimate impact of the materially more and more marvellous inventions, but mankind as a whole has only hurtled forwards, trusting that the onrush of machines, compounded by electronics and computers, could only be more and more beneficent. Yet is it a wise or happy man whose nose is always buried in his smart-phone?

The basic problem is that machines are purely material while human beings are primarily spiritual. So the most useful of machines can only sub-serve what is primary or most important in the life of human beings. Man is indeed composed of material body as well as spiritual soul, so that material machines can certainly serve his body, but that body is merely the carrier of his spiritual soul for the duration of his brief life on earth, and then at death either the soul without supernatural grace drags the body down to the eternal torments of Hell, or the soul with the grace of Christ lifts the body, normally through the temporary torments of Purgatory, to the permanent bliss of Heaven. Either way, whatever the body may have done or not done to the soul during life, after death it is the state of the soul which determines the fate of the body, and not the other way round.

However, in our terrible times even Catholics can lose their grip on these elementary realities of body and soul, life and death, so let us turn to music to illustrate the limitations of matter and machines. In a modern recording studio there may be dozens of high-performing machines and thousands of brilliant buttons, knobs and dials making up ever more perfect machines for the recording of what? For the ever more faithful reproduction of sound? What sound? The sound of a human being either singing or playing an instrument. And why record it? Because the recording will sell and make money. And why will it make money? Because music is a unique language for expressing emotions in the human soul, and be it Furtwaengler conducting a classical orchestra, or the Beatles strumming on guitars, the human musicians are by their musical gifts expressing through the material means of orchestra or guitar in the material-spiritual language of music those spiritual emotions which a whole public wants musicians to express for it. And if the musicians are soulless, the most brilliant of recording engineers will never make a living. In every human art, the mechanics are necessarily subordinate to the artists.

Therefore the more spiritual are the lives and activities of men, the less seriously will they take merely material upheavals in human affairs, such as the managing Director of Mercedes Benz evokes. On the other hand the more men turn away from God, the larger such upheavals bulk in their lives. Readers, take a spiritual Rosary into your material hands, and leave well behind you the looming disasters of our materialistic “civilisation.”

Kyrie eleison.

Putin Speaks

Putin Speaks on October 14, 2017

When everything in the world around us is being turned upside down, it should not surprise us to find the Pope talking like a Communist politician and the leader of Russia talking like a Catholic Pope. Thus one reader of these “Comments” was surprised to see them (August 5) referring to “Holy Russia,” when since 1917 it is Russia that has been spreading its errors throughout the world. But “Holy Russia” is an expression that goes much further back than the 20th century. It refers to the Russian people’s natural inclination to religion. If from 1917 to 1989 they were the spring-bed of international Communism, that is only because they served it with a religious fervour, because it was – and still is – the messianism of materialism, the main Jewish substitute religion for post-Christians (who have only themselves to blame).

But 72 years of Communism caused the Russians so much suffering that they learned their lesson and are now finding their way back to God, and their nation’s turning to Him has deserved for them from God a true statesman for their leader, who is the hope of many decent souls all over the world. Some experts in the perfidy of the New World Order are still distrustful of Vladimir Putin, which is understandable, but as Americans say, if he talks, walks and quacks like a follower of Christ, then common sense says that he is a follower of Christ. Read here a version (taken from video sub-titles) of a speech of his one year ago in Russia, and judge for yourselves if his world-vision is not Christian:—

A further challenge for the Russian national identity is connected to the processes we observe outside of Russia. They include foreign policy, morals and other aspects. We see that many Euro-Atlantic States have taken the path of denying or rejecting their Christian roots which form the basis of Western civilisation. In these countries the basis of morals and of any traditional identity is being denied – national, religious, cultural and even gender identities are being denied or relativized. There, politics treat a family with many children as juridically equal to a homosexual partnership – faith in God is equal to faith in Satan. The excesses and exaggerations of “political correctness” in these countries lead to serious consideration for the legitimising of political parties that promote propaganda for paedophilia.

The people in European States are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are even frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or given neutral names, as if one were ashamed of those Christian holidays. By this means the deeper moral value of these celebrations is hidden from view. And these countries try to force this model onto other countries. I am deeply convinced that to live this way will lead directly to culture being degraded and returned to a primitive condition. And this makes the demographic and moral crisis of the West still deeper. Today nearly all countries of the West cannot survive reproductively, not even with the inflow of population by immigration. What clearer proof of the moral crisis in the West could there be than this inability to reproduce itself?

Without the moral values that are rooted in Christianity and other world religions, without rules and moral values that have been formed and developed over thousands of years, people inevitably lose their human dignity. As for ourselves we think it is right and natural to defend these moral values coming from Christianity. We must respect the right to self-determination of every minority, but by the same token there cannot and must not be any doubt about the rights of the majority.

At the same time as we observe this decadence at the national level in the West, on the international level we observe the attempt to unify the world in accordance with a unipolar model, to relativize and remove institutions of international law and national sovereignty. In such a unipolar unified world there is no place for sovereign States, because such a world requires only vassals. From a historical perspective such a unipolar world would mean the surrender of one’s own identity and God-created diversity.

Kyrie eleison.

Hebdocure

Hebdocure on January 31, 2015

Last week these “Comments,” in a most politically incorrect manner, presented the heavily publicized January 7 attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo as an attack upon the remains of Christian civilisation in France. Then let them this week put forward how Christian civilisation would solve the problem, in the same order, for cartoonists, gunmen, politicians, peoples and conspirators.

As for the cartoonists, if France were still Catholic, Church and State would still be united, as they were until the French Revolution, and State authorities would absolutely have forbidden such blasphemous anti-Christian cartoons as those by which Charlie Hebdo may well have provoked Almighty God to allow for the silencing of its cartoonists. But that would be censorship? Only a fool can think we suffer under no censorship today. The censorship is simply anti-Christian instead of Christian. Who today is free to blaspheme against Holocaustianity and its “gas-chambers”?

As for the muslim gunmen, to a Catholic France they might never have come. Never would Catholic State authorities have despised or hated muslims in their own countries, but at the same time never would they so have lost sight of the historic clash between Islam and Christianity as to allow to settle in France such a mass of muslim immigrants as have been allowed, even encouraged, to settle in France since World War II. Nor would they ever have learned to scorn their own race and despise their own traditions as they have allowed themselves to be taught to do today. By the Fourth Commandment a Catholic loves his own country above all, without wishing ill to any others.

Most important of all, if France had stayed Catholic, neither the politicians nor the people would have become the puppets that they are today of hidden puppet-masters, the Globalists. In the 17th century France was Catholic as a whole, but in the 18th century, for lack of Catholic faith, its ruling class allowed itself to become thoroughly infected with another form of Globalism, Freemasonry. Launched in its modern form in apostate England in 1717, Freemasonry swiftly spread to France and North America where it master-minded the American and French Revolutions in 1776 and 1789 respectively. Both of them were major steps towards the Globalists’ New World Order.

Now, for as long as the Catholic Church was still in its right mind, it denounced and condemned Freemasonry as being a secret society designed to undermine and overthrow the Catholic religion altogether – see for instance Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, Humanum Genus of 1884. Thus from the French Revolution onwards, States have been ever more separated from the Catholic Church and have been put instead on secular and democratic foundations. More and more the new middle-class rulers have abandoned the Catholic religion in favour of liberalism, which is in effect a substitute religion, adoring man and his liberty instead of God and his Truth. So in the name of “freedom” journalists took over from priests, and their liberal media took over the people’s thinking. But all the while journalists and media have been secretly directed by Freemasonry, working for the Globalists’ New World Order. Here is how, under cover of “democracy” and “freedom,” the highly motivated Globalists have been able to reduce peoples and politicians to puppets of public opinion, moulded by their media. To turn one’s back on God’s Truth is to enslave oneself to Satan’s lies.

The Charlie Hebdo attack was designed for a huge demonstration to favour godless liberty, or rather licence, and a murderous muslim-European tension. More such events will follow, to arrive at bloodbaths from which the Globalists count on emerging supreme, from which Almighty God hopes that men will see that rejecting him is a huge problem, the basic problem. If the States will not see this, it remains only for families to pray the five Mysteries a day, and individuals the fifteen a day (if reasonably possible), to beg Our Lady to intercede with her Son.

Kyrie eleison.

Milan Edict

Milan Edict on August 31, 2013

In our days when liberalism taking over the Society of St Pius X looks like merely the last in a long line of defeats of the Catholic Church, it is difficult to imagine that there was once a time when the Church scored one victory after another. Nevertheless this year we celebrate the 1700th anniversary of one of those victories, the Edict of Milan, dating from 313 AD.

The Roman Emperor Constantine, known as “Constantine the Great,” was born in 272 and he was baptised Christian only shortly before his death in 337, but he had been seriously sympathetic to Christianity for many years beforehand. When in 312 he marched on Rome to fight his rival, Emperor Maxentius, Our Lord promised him victory if he would put on his battle standards the “labarum,” the X with a P imposed on it, the first two Greek letters of the word Christ. Constantine did what Our Lord said, and defeated Maxentius at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Once in firm control of Rome, Constantine issued the following year the Edict of Milan.

In the course of the previous 250 years, worshippers of Christ had suffered ten bloody persecutions under the Roman Emperors, from Nero (37–68) to Diocletian (243–316). Christians had refused the pagan State religion, so the State had banned Christianity. What the Edict of Milan did was to make Christianity for the first time legal alongside other religions allowed in the Empire. It was the decisive step in the conversion of Rome to Christianity. In 325 Constantine endorsed the orthodoxy of the dogmatic Council of Nicaea. In 380 the Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of Rome, and in 392 Theodosius forbade pagan worship.

Thus Constantine began that union of (Catholic) Church and State which was the foundation of Christendom, better known today as “Western civilisation.” Whatever may have been down the ages the abuse of that union in practice, it is in principle immensely fruitful for the salvation of souls. One need only think of how any township even today will profit from a sane priest and a sane policeman complementing one another. For 1600 years the Catholic Church held to that principle of the union of Church and State, whereas for the last 200 years Revolutionary liberalism has constantly sought to undermine it. Only with Vatican II did the Church at last give way and repudiate the doctrine of the Catholic State by its teaching on religious liberty in Dignitatis Humanae. A ringleader of the neo-modernists at the Council, Fr Yves Congar rejoiced that the Council had put an end to the “Constantinian Church.”

Now it is true that the churchmen being linked to the worldly authorities will bring temptations of worldliness with it, but any State is bound to enforce laws that correspond to some religious or anti-religious view of God and man. To see how difficult it is to lead a Catholic life when that view of the State accords with the anti-religion of secular humanism, just look around you. It was the all-surrounding pressure of modern irreligious States upon the bishops of Vatican II that made them want to change the Catholic Church to fit the modern world. The same pressure is now making the leadership of the Society of St Pius X go the way of the Revolution.

Constantine on the contrary must down the ages have contributed to the salvation of millions of souls, an achievement for which he is surely in Heaven. Emperor Constantine, pray for us.

Kyrie eleison.

Culture Alert

Culture Alert on December 29, 2012

As the leadership of the Society of St Pius X seems to be faltering, so Catholics who love the Society because they have received so much from it in years gone by might be tempted to think that there is nothing much that they as simple faithful can do about it. They would be wrong. Let them read these reflections from a friend of mine, and they should be able to read between the lines that if God does not rescue the Society for them, as of course he could do, then it has at least in part depended on them. My friend’s letter is adapted here below:—

“A practical agreement would be ruinous to the cause of Catholic Tradition. One need only look at what has happened to the Traditional Redemptorists in Scotland . . . The two Masses cannot co-exist. One will always drive the other out . . . At a Novus Ordo Mass I attended recently, the whole church was pervaded by chatter and continual clapping . . . The two sides are simply too far apart for an agreement to work. No meeting of the minds is possible between modernity and Tradition.

“Then there is the profound revolution which has overwhelmed modern civilization, including the Traditional movement, and which has for the most part been missed by the leadership of Tradition . . . Electronic technology has wrought a cultural revolution in our lives, especially of the younger generation. If it is not managed properly, it certainly weakens the faith because it can take over people’s whole lives. Youngsters are liable to be captured by it. They hang on it all day long. People too engulfed in it become dysfunctional, unable to get up in the morning, or to maintain a live conversation, or to hold down a job.

“Now if a sports team is not admonished by its coach, its playing standards begin to fall. If Catholics are not admonished on cultural issues like music, women’s dress, or watching television, their cultural standards begin to fall, which has profound implications for their faith. Traditional parents are being left to struggle alone with their families to keep the worldliness of modern society out of their homes, because the leadership of the SSPX has either missed this cultural revolution, or it is not giving it the attention that it deserves. I have had many long discussions with Traditional families who are concerned about the way that the Traditional movement is going. Religious movements must take a stand on cultural issues if they are to flourish. Tradition was strengthened when it used to take a stand on television. But if a stand is not taken on cultural issues, the stand on doctrinal issues soon begins to weaken.

“The latest Chapter of the SSPX may have pulled the organization back from the brink, but I cannot take much comfort from it. It spent much attention on defining the parameters of any future discussions with Rome in making an agreement. Yet, Rome is basically unchanged from 1988. In my opinion, the SSPX needs to recover the prophetic role that it performed when Archbishop Lefebvre was still alive. The Traditional movement needs to strongly denounce the modernism and liberalism that is leading the Catholic Church to its destruction. These denunciations lately have been muted. Perhaps many Traditional priests are distracted by the comforts that they think an agreement with Rome would bring them.”

Over to you, dear readers. Away with trashy and valueless music in the home. Get rid of the television set. Reduce electronics to a minimum. Mothers, wear skirts whenever possible, which is most of the time. Otherwise do not complain if God does not rescue the Society. He forces his gifts upon nobody. Blessed be his name for ever.

Kyrie eleison.