Weep for Bad Religious Art

FEW things so damage the rights of God in the world than bad religious art.

Images of Jesus that are sentimental and portray Him with as much sublimity as a fitness instructor or rock star are extremely offensive. They are outright lies. Better no image of Jesus than an image that is profane or too-human.

Protestantist groups have long specialized in tawdry representations of this kind. But then the ‘Catholic Church that hates the Catholic Church’ now reigning from Rome does the same. The fact that many Protestants are guilty of vulgar sentimentality is nothing new, but that an institution claiming to be the Catholic Church, which has inspired so much beauty and transcendence in art, should produce an almost daily landslide of imagery inspired by the ethics of advertising and secular humanitarianism rather than supernatural grace is a fact so astonishing as to be difficult to absorb.

Sentimentality in religion is a serious fault. (So is superficiality — and the two are related.) The sentimental person forgets or is incapable of understanding that many people don’t share this gushiness or love of the sweet and cute. A person focused on his own good feelings is a person estranged from the truth of the human condition.

The spiritual world is all too invisible. People engrossed in the visible world have a hard time feeling for it. A great artist can interest them in the sublime by his capacity to convey other-worldliness.

It is possible to find truth in religion by following the trail of great art. A simple and truthful person can look at an image of a cathedral built many years ago and an image of a recent “Catholic” building and realize that these come from two irreconcilable belief systems. He doesn’t need a course in theology because these two buildings are visual manifestations of theological doctrines.

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Aquinas on Christ’s Sufferings

FROM Meditations for Each Day in Lent by St. Thomas Aquinas

Christ underwent every kind of suffering

“Every kind of suffering.” The things men suffer may be understood in two ways. By “kind” we may mean a particular, individual suffering, and in this sense there was no reason why Christ should suffer every kind of suffering, for many kinds of suffering are contrary the one to the other, as for example, to be burnt and to be drowned. We are of course speaking of Our Lord as suffering from causes outside himself, for to suffer the suffering effected by internal causes, such as bodily sickness, would not have become him. But if by “kind” we mean the class, then Our Lord did suffer by every kind of suffering, as we can show in three ways:

“1. By considering the men through whom He suffered. For He suffered something at the hands of Gentiles and of Jews, of men and even of women as the story of the servant girl who accused St. Peter goes to show. He suffered, again, at the hands of rulers, of their ministers, and of the people, as was prophesied, Why have the Gentiles raged; and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together against the Lord and against his Christ (Ps. ii. i, 2). (more…)

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Gregory the Great

“It is better that scandals arise than the truth be suppressed.”

—- Pope St. Gregory the Great

FROM Dom Prosper Guéranger on Pope St. Gregory the Great (540-604), who was responsible for the conversion of England:

Such was the respect, wherewith everything he wrote was treated, that his very Letters were preserved as so many precious treasures. This immense Correspondence shows us, that there was not a country, scarcely even a city, of the Christian world, on which the Pontiff had not his watchful eye steadily fixed; that there was not a question, however local or personal, which, if it interested religion, did not excite his zeal and arbitration, as the Bishop of the universal Church. If certain writers of modern times had but taken the pains to glance at these Letters, written by a Pope of the 6th century, they would never have asserted, as they have done, that the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff are based on documents, fabricated, as they say, two hundred years after the death of Gregory.

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The Goodness of God

Early Spring, Daniel Garber

All the works of the Lord are exceeding good.

At his word the waters stood as a heap: and at the words of his mouth the receptacles of waters:

For at his commandment favour is shewn, and there is no diminishing of his salvation.

The works of all flesh are before him, and there is nothing hid from his eyes.

He seeth from eternity to eternity, and there is nothing wonderful before him.

There is no saying: What is this, or what is that? for all things shall be sought in their time.

His blessing hath overflowed like a river.

And as a flood hath watered the earth; so shall his wrath inherit the nations, that have not sought after him:

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A Calf in March

Cows in a Marshy Landscape, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

 

A March Calf

Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites
Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,
A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,
Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,
Half of him legs,
Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more
But that mother’s milk come back often.

Everything else is in order, just as it is.
Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.
This is just as he wants it.
A little at a time, of each new thing, is best. 

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The Rasputin Influencing the American Right

DANA Loesch and James Lindsay discuss the creepy Russian theorist Alexander Dugin, who is gaining increasing influence on the American right. They give a nice summary of who Dugin is and what he believes.

This is must-listening. Familiarize yourself with Dugin because he and his ideas are a serious threat. In this article at Substack, Bree A. Dail also looks at Dugin’s role and the figures who appear to support him, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.

More here.

He has been celebrated & interviewed by Alex Jones multiple times, Haz Al Din, Tucker Carlson & Glenn Greenwald.

Benjamin Teitelbaum revealed in his book, “War for Eternity” that Steve Bannon secretly met with Dugin in 2018.

His popular book, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,”, promoted by Jack Posobiec, set out a playbook for dealing with the West that seems by now all too familiar: using disinformation and soft power to “provoke all forms of instability and separatism” within the United States, including by stoking racial and political tensions, while bolstering nationalism and authoritarianism at home.

He recently claimed that Russia has ideological friends in MAGA… “useful” to the Russian Influence Ops Dugin’s running:

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They Promised Peace

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again, and again, and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

— President Roosevelt, Campaign Speech, Oct 1940, 14 months prior to entering World War II in Dec 1941.

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end — and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

— President Trump, Inaugural Address, Jan 2025, 14 months prior to entering war with Iran in Feb-March 2026.

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A Universal Cause of Forgiveness

“CHRIST, in His Passion, delivered us from our sins in a causal way, that is to say, He set up for us a thing which would be a cause of our emancipation, a thing whereby any sin might at any time be remitted, whether committed now, or in times gone by, or in time to come: much as a physician might make a medicine from which all who are sick may be healed, even those sick in the years yet to come.

“But since what gives the Passion of Christ its excellence is the fact that it is the universal cause of the forgiveness of sins, it is necessary that we each of us ourselves make use of it for the forgiveness of our own particular sins. This is done through Baptism, Penance and the other sacraments, whose power derives from the Passion of Christ.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas

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When the Devil is Just a Figure of Speech

From Dom Prosper Guéranger’s essay on the Third Sunday of Lent:

…[I]t is no rare thing to meet with persons who ridicule the idea of Devils being permitted to be on this earth of ours! They call it a prejudice, a popular superstition, of the Middle-Ages! Of course they deny that it is a dogma of Faith. When we read the History of the Church or the Lives of the Saints, they have their own way of explaining whatever is there related on this subject. To hear them talk, one would suppose that they look upon Satan as a mere abstract idea, to be taken as the personification of evil.

When they would account for the origin of their own or others’ sins, they explain all by the evil inclination of man’s heart, and by the bad use we make of our free-will. They never think of what we are taught by Christian doctrine; namely, that we are also instigated to sin by a wicked being, whose power is as great as is the hatred he bears us.

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Trump’s War

CHUCK Baldwin, Protestant critic of Zionism, sums up Trump’s actions in Iran nicely.

Honestly, anyone who was surprised by this attack on Iran is very naive.

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Perfection Lies in Ordinary Things

“IF we demanded it of you for your perfection exquisite and extraordinary things, elevations and lofty contemplations, you might excuse yourself, saying that you could not venture so high. If we demanded of you daily disciplines to blood, or fasting on bread and water, or going barefoot with a perpetual hairshirt, you might say that you did not feel strong enough for that. But that is not what we demand of you, nor in that does your perfection lie, but in doing the very thing that you are doing, taking care that it be well done. With the same works that you are doing, if you like, you can be perfect: the cost is already paid, you need not add more works. Who will not be animated hereby to be perfect, when perfection comes so ready to his hand, and lies in a thing so familiar and so feasible?

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The Goodness of God

“[T]he more light and appreciation a man has of the goodness and majesty of God, the deeper becomes his knowledge of his own misery and nothingness. Abyss cries to abyss (Ps. 41), the great abyss of the knowledge of God, and of His goodness and infinite majesty, discovers to us the depths of our own misery; and by the beams of this divine light we come to see the specks and motes of our imperfections, and how much we still want of being perfect.”

— Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J., Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues (1609)

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Rome at the Time of Christ

                                                      Fresco, 1st century AD

THERE were but a few to flatter themselves with the hope of finding an answer to their questions, repose to their spirit and their conscience, and full relief of their necessities, in a system of philosophy. As the product of the human mind left to its own resources, philosophy had travelled through, and exhausted, every conceivable system, at an astonishing outlay of acuteness and speculative power; and still there was no appearance any where of a site upon which to found, or a creative spirit and fertile imagination with which to construct, the new edifice. Individual schools had run through and consumed their patrimony ; none had been able to maintain themselves, all were approaching dissolution. Men became more and more conscious of their own deepening aspirations after a God who was absolutely elevated above every thing earthly and mundane. A God they must have and they coveted, whom they could in all sincerity address in prayer, who, as all-ruling lord and judge, would be the object of dread and fear, and, as all holy and merciful, the cynosure of homage and love, satisfying every want of the troubled and longing heart. But the Stoics, though still the highest in repute among philosophers, had nothing to tender to men in this need of God, but their nature-power, bound up in matter, and only manifesting itself in the development of the universe, much as they laboured to attribute intelligence and bliss to this world’s soul of theirs, that contained every vital principle in it self, this god of the ether, ruling in the world with the arm of necessity. (more…)

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The Goodness of God

WERE any man created with a heart as large and capacious as the hearts of all men together, and if he were enabled by an extraordinary light to apprehend one of the divine attributes, his joy and delight would be such that, unless supported by special assistance from God, he could not endure them.”

— St. Augustine

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Judaism Basics

CATHOLIC polemics against Jews are not racial, but theological. The Catholic Church has always condemned racial hatred of Jews.

The problem with Judaism is not the biology of Jews, but rather their doctrines and their actions based on these beliefs. This video does an excellent job of explaining the distinctions.

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Liberal and Orthodox Jews Work Together

FROM Americanism and the Anti-Christian Conspiracy (1899) by Msgr. Henri Delassus (translated by Patrick Odou; pp 47-48):

After 18 centuries of unyielding obstinacy in its religious beliefs and practices, Israel is shaking. We see many Jews becoming philosophers and free-thinkers, no longer having any other bonds with the Jews of the Talmud than those of race and blood.

They are called liberals in opposition to the traditionalists. They qualify themselves as “reformers.” Those who are called “reformers,” says the Israelite Archives, “want to be immediately rid of all the chains and reject the Talmud.” (XII, p. 242 ff., 1867)

The liberal reformers are recruited especially from those who live in the West, those who have drunk from the cup of our civilization.

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