FROM The Life and Letters of Saint Francis Xavier, (Letter LXXIX, 1549-1552):

“We shall write to you about Japan, just as far as we get acquainted with it, and what we ourselves have learnt. In the first place, the nation with which we have had to do here surpasses in goodness any of the nations lately discovered. I really think that among barbarous nations there can be none that has more natural goodness than the Japanese. They are of a kindly disposition, not at all given to cheating, wonderfully desirous of honour and rank. Honour with them is placed above every thing else. There are a great many poor among them, but poverty is not a disgrace to any one. There is one thing among them of which I hardly know whether it is practised anywhere among Christians. The nobles, however poor they may be, receive the same honour from the rest as if they were rich; nor can any noble, however poor and needy, be induced to contract marriage with even the richest plebeian. They think that by coming down to ally themselves with plebeians they lose a great deal of dignity and estimation, and thus it is that they despise riches in comparison with dignity. They have a great many observances of courtesy among themselves. They are very fond of arms and weapons, and rely upon them very much. The highest and lowest alike always wear their swords and daggers—even boys of fourteen years of age. They never bear an insult either in word or deed. (more…)

From St. Francis Xavier’s “Letter on the Missions,” written from India, to St. Ignatius de Loyola, 1549:

May the grace and charity of our Lord Christ always be with us! Amen.

My own and only Father in the Heart of Christ, I think that the many letters from this place which have lately been sent to Rome will inform you how prosperously the affairs of religion go on in these parts, through your prayers and the good bounty of God. But there seem to be certain things which I ought myself to speak about to you; so I will just touch on a few points relating to these parts of the world which are so distant from Rome. In the first place, the whole race of the Indians, as far as I have been able to see, is very barbarous; and it does not like to listen to anything that is not agreeable to its own manners and customs, which, as I say, are barbarous. It troubles itself very little to learn anything about divine things and things which concern salvation. Most of the Indians are of vicious disposition, and are adverse to virtue. Their instability, levity, and inconstancy of mind are incredible; they have hardly any honesty, so inveterate are their habits of sin and cheating. We have hard work here, both in keeping the Christians up to the mark and in converting the heathen. And, as we are your children, it is fair that on this account you should take great care of us and help us continually by your prayers to God. You know very well what a hard business it is to teach people who neither have any knowledge of God nor follow reason, but think it a strange and intolerable thing to be told to give up their habits of sin, which have now gained all the force of nature by long possession. (more…)

FROM The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, Book III, Letter LV, (c. 1545-1548):

I have very good reason to thank God for the fruits which came of this work. The converts took up the practice of singing hymns of the praises of God with so much ardour, that the native boys in the street, the young girls and the women in the houses, the labourers in the fields, the fishermen on the sea, instead of singing licentious and blasphemous songs, were always singing the elements of the Christian doctrine. And as all the songs had been put in the language of the country, they were understood equally well by the newly made Christians and the heathen. And, by the favour of God, the Portuguese in the country and the rest of the inhabitants, both Christian and heathen, took such an affection for me that I found favour in their eyes. I passed from thence into the islands that are called ‘of the Moor,’ about sixty leagues from Molucco. There were here many Christian villages unattended to for a length of time, both on account of their great distance from India, and because the natives had put to death the only priest who was among them. In these islands I baptized a great number of children, and in the space of three months, for I remained that length of time, I visited all the Christian villages, and made them devoted to Christ and to myself. All these isles are full of dangers, on account of the feuds which rage among the inhabitants and their civil wars; the race is barbarous, totally ignorant of letters, devoid of any written monuments of the past, and without any notions of reading or writing. It is their practice to take away the lives of any whom they hate by poison, and in this way a great many are killed. The soil is rugged and destitute of productions which support life. There is no corn nor wine; the natives scarcely know what flesh meat is; they have no herds nor flocks, nothing but a few swine, which are rather objects of curiosity than food. Wild boars abound; good water is very rare; rice is plentiful; there are  trees in great numbers from which they get a kind of bread and of wine, and others out of the woven bark of which the clothing which they all use is made. I have written all this to you, my dearest brothers, that you may know how much these islands overflow with heavenly joys. (more…)

ALAN writes:

These are the exact words that were posted at the St. Louis Police Department’s website:

“….officers are investigation a shooting that injured two 18-year-old males injured on April 9, 2026 in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood…..”

When I lived in that neighborhood sixty years ago, I could walk the streets any time of day or night and not get injured by “a shooting”.  It was so long ago that there were even things like common sense and proofreading. We had two daily newspapers, but they never reported that “officers are investigation” anything or that people who were injured were injured. (more…)

“THE more thou grudgest by impatience, either against God for any tribulation or sickness, or other bodily disease sent by Him, or against thy neighbour, for aught that he doth against thee, the less is the image of Jesus reformed in thee. I say not that such grudgings or fleshly angriness are deadly sins; but I say that they hinder the cleanness of heart and peace of conscience, that thou canst not have perfect charity, by the which thou shouldst come to life Contemplative. Cleanse thy heart also from venial sins as much as thou canst; and that the ground of sin might by grace of Jesus Christ be somewhat shaken in thee. For though it be so that thou feelest no evil against thy neighbour for a time, yet art thou not secure that the ground of anger is quenched in thee; neither yet art thou lord and master of the virtue of charity. (more…)

“DO you hope to escape what no mortal man has ever yet escaped? What saint in this world has been without his cross and without some trouble? Truly, our Lord Jesus was not one hour without some sorrow and pain as long as He lived here. It behoooved Him to suffer death and to rise again and so to enter into His glory. How is it, then, that you seek any other way to heaven than this plain, high way of the Cross. All the life of Christ was Cross and martyrdom; do you seek pleasure and joy? You err greatly if you seek any other thing than to suffer, for all this mortal life is full of misery and is all surrounded and marked with crosses. And the more highly a man profits in spirit, the more painful crosses will he find, for, by the firm certainty of Christ’s love, in which he daily increases, the pain of this exile daily appears to him more and more.”

—- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book Two, Chapter 12

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WELCOME to Frisco, Texas — an apparent convergence of materialism, American-style and Hindu-style.

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‘OF SHILLS AND GRIFTERS’ looks at the ‘social-psychology’ of Russia, where a “prison culture” has created a macho and sadistic personality type, and explains its relevance to geopolitical events. [Use closed captions to avoid profanity.]

“Westerners don’t understand key elements in Russian social psychology. … The prison culture is everywhere in Russia today because it is, well, it is a prison state.”

See also “The Chabadian Puppet that is Donald Trump” and “The Demoralization of the Dissident Right is Absolute.”

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“HE [the Holy Ghost] is the Love who, with its divine weight and influence of love, sways the blessed Trinity to the external act of creation; infinite Being leans, as it were, towards the deep abyss of nothingness, and out of the abyss creates. The holy Spirit opened the divine council, and said, ‘Let us make man to Our image and likeness!’ then God created man to His own image; He created him to the image of God, taking his own Word as the model to which he worked; for that Word is the sovereign archetype, according to which is formed the more or less perfect essence of each created being. Like him, then, to whose image he was made, man was endowed with understanding and free-will. As such, he would govern the whole inferior creation, and make it serve the purpose of its Creator, that is, he would turn it into a homage of praise and glory to its God; and though that homage would be finite, yet would it be the best of which it was capable. This is what is called the natural order; it is an immense world of perfect harmonies; and, had it ever existed without any further perfection than its own natural one, it would have been a master-piece of God’s goodness; and yet, it would have been far from realizing the designs of the Spirit of Love.”

— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Feast of Corpus Christi,” The Liturgical Year

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“AT great expense and long journeys, men seek for themselves distinguished teachers, and consider it the highest honor and greatest joy to become their disciples and learn human sciences from their lips. At less cost and with less effort, we can find in the Sacred Heart of Jesus the surest teacher.  

“This Divine Teacher gives us two kinds of lessons: some external, through the voice of the Church; others internal, through His secret inspiration. And what does He teach? Great truths, maxims of eternal life, counsels of salvation, and all-heavenly prudence. Instructed by this Divine Master, men and women of the Church of God, both unlettered and learned, have been seen to amaze and confound the wise, and to leave for future generations monuments of profound inner wisdom, acquired not in schools, but in communion and familiarity with this Sacred Heart.   

“O Master of truth! O book ever open to those who wish to penetrate its secrets! O holy chair, where neither Moses nor the prophets, nor the philosophers, but God Himself, dictates lessons of truth to the disciples of His Heart!  

“Open, O Lord, my heart, that I may docilely receive such divine teachings, and follow and practice them with all fidelity. 

“Meditate for a few minutes.   

“Who have you listened to until today, my soul? To teachers of seductive words who have led you down paths of perdition.    (more…)

The principle “all inequality of condition is an injustice” is totally contrary to nature, a producer of envy and injustice and subversive to all social order. 

(Saint Pope Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, 21)

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WIDESPREAD missionary efforts by Dominicans, Capuchins and Jesuits centuries ago brought about the baptism and conversion of many blacks in the French colony of Haiti. These efforts did not prevent the island, however, from descending into a chaos of anti-white violence in the 18th century and later. Massacres of whites and a reversion to barbarism occurred when the Catholic colonialists embraced egalitarianism following the French Revolution. Of the massacres in 1804,

The people chosen to be killed were targeted primarily based on three criteria: “skin color, citizenship and vocation.” While some whites, such as Poles and Germans who were granted citizenship and “a few non-French veterans and American merchants, along with some useful professionals such as priests and doctors” were spared, political affiliation was not considered. The white victims were almost entirely French, commensurate with their share in the white population of Haiti. About his targets of the massacre, [Jean-Jacques] Dessalines’ slogan exemplified his mission to eradicate the white population with the saying “Break the eggs, take out the [sic] yolk [a pun on the word ‘yellow’ which means both yolk and mulatto] and eat the white.” Upper class whites were not the only target; any white of any socioeconomic status was also to be killed, including the urban poor known as petits blancs. During the massacre, stabbing, beheading, and disemboweling were common. (Source)

Although the violence likely would have been much worse without the successful efforts of valiant missionaries, the history of the former colony is a lesson in what happens when Catholics embrace anti-Christian notions of racial equality.

William Luther Pierce, not a Christian himself but correct in his appraisal of the “Lessons of Haiti,” describes in this video what became of the island nation under the reign of revolutionary ‘political correctness.’

The religious cult of equality, Pierce remarks, “is as devoid of reason and logic as the voodoo of Haitians.”

Indeed, it is. The idea that profound racial differences can be obliterated by Christianity is a utopian and diabolical superstition, an existential threat to whites as they become minorities in their historic lands.

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FROM The Catholic Church in the Modern World by E.E.Y. Hales (Hanover House, 1958):

… There was indeed something formal, even forceful, about the way in which it was assumed that all those who were the subjects of His Catholic Majesty of Spain must needs become members of the Catholic Church, and the close association in the popular mind between obedience to the political representative of the Catholic King and obedience to the bishop was something which would react severely against the Church in South American in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, conversion carried with it not only an outward incorporation by baptism, in the Body of Christ, but some inward understanding too. If the Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan missionaries baptized the ‘converted’ Indians by thousands, they went on to instruct them in the meaning of the sacraments and the meaning of the Mass. Moreover, the Spanish and Portugese system required the same should be done for the Negro slaves, who had been carried overseas to toil in the West Indies, or on the American mainland from Florida down to Mexico, Peru, or Buenos Aires. This slavery was a great evil, but it was very much better in the Catholic fold. In the words of that coolly impartial and skeptically detached historian, the late Mr. H.A.L. Fisher, ‘The Roman Church honourably endeavoured to improve the lot of the labouring population in the Spanish colonies. The slave was baptised, prepared for the Mass, retained in his family group, and brought through his membership of the Church within the system of Spain. For the British colonies the Church of England made no comparable effort. While the Spanish Church pressed forward on its missionary enterprise the British planters looked with active disfavour on the attempt to spread among the blacks the disturbing ferment of Christian belief.'”

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“WE speak of the things which you see with your own eyes, which We both bemoan. Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline — none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil. Our Roman See is harassed violently and the bonds of unity are daily loosened and severed. The divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off. She is subjected to human reason and with the greatest injustice exposed to the hatred of the people and reduced to vile servitude. The obedience due bishops is denied and their rights are trampled underfoot. Furthermore, academies and schools resound with new, monstrous opinions, which openly attack the Catholic faith; this horrible and nefarious war is openly and even publicly waged. Thus, by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted and a tremendous blow is dealt to religion and the perversion of morals is spread. So the restraints of religion are thrown off, by which alone kingdoms stand. We see the destruction of public order, the fall of principalities, and the overturning of all legitimate power approaching. Indeed this great mass of calamities had its inception in the heretical societies and sects in which all that is sacrilegious, infamous, and blasphemous has gathered as bilge water in a ship’s hold, a congealed mass of all filth.”

—- Mirari Vos, On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism
Pope Gregory XVI, 1832

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“BUT with what pain must we purchase such a light of the Holy Spirit! It must needs be, in short, that our mind is interiorly dislocated, that it opens wide to the point of stretching itself out, in order to make contact with the Infinite as he is himself. That is a terrible moment; the mystics call it the great desolation of the great darkness. That which gave the light to our eyes, none of that is with us any more. We must give up the natural movements of our mind when faced with facts; we must, as it were, annihilate the act of the mind taking pleasure in what it sees. It is painful, but this pain engenders a great joy. This entire docility, going to the limit of renouncing even the forces of the mind, renders to God the only homage worthy of his majesty.”

— — The Holy Spirit in Christian Life, by Père Gardeil, O.P (Blackfriars, 1953)

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[Reposted]

FROM Racism, Guilt, Self Hatred, And Self Deceit by Gedaliah Braun, PhD (2007):

I am an American who from 1976 to 1988 taught philosophy at universities in Nigeria, Kenya and Papua New Guinea, since which time I have lived in South Africa … With very few exceptions, blacks in Africa regard it as an obvious, commonplace fact, needing no argument, and provoking no ‘offense’ whatsoever, that the white man is superior to the black man. ‘Blaming’ this inferiority on whites or colonialism (‘externalism’), therefore, is obviously a nonstarter.

This claim about black attitudes is based on conversations with hundreds of blacks in Africa and Papua New Guinea. That indigenous blacks so matter-of-factly believe this does not make it true; but it does establish that for them, the question of racial differences is not a ‘sensitive’ issue. Where does this idea come from – that racial difference is a despicable idea, so disgraceful that the mere suggestion of it can end careers? I believe it comes from whites rather than blacks, which is why, in black Africa, where there are few whites and remarkably little Western ideological influence, the idea that all races are the same and that it is morally bad to say otherwise is almost unknown. (more…)

[Reposted]

FROM Racism, Guilt, Self Hatred And Self Deceit: A Philosopher’s Look at the Dark Continent by Gedaliah Braun (2010):

I have long suspected that the concept of rape cannot mean the same in Africa as elsewhere. And now (over the Internet, MSNBC Home), I find this from Newsweek (“Breaking The Silence”, by Tom Masland, dated 9 July 2000; emphases in original):

According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] … more than half of the young people interviewed – both male and female – believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence…. [T]he casual manner in which South African teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is staggering.

Masland is stunned by blacks’ behaviour, asking ‘Why Has The Safe-Sex Effort Failed So Abjectly?’ Well, aside from their profoundly different attitude towards sex and violence and their intense libido, a major factor has to be their diminished concept of time and their inability to think ahead, resulting in a ‘just-don’t-give-a-damn’ attitude. (more…)

FROM Racism, Guilt, Self Hatred, And Self Deceit (2010) by Gedaliah Braun:

In August 1976, when I left America to teach Philosophy at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, I did so somewhat reluctantly. On the subject of blacks and Africa, I was a tabula rasa [a ‘blank slate’]. I grew up in a typical ‘liberal’ environment where one was taught never to use the word ‘nigger’ (the American equivalent of the South African term ‘kaffir’) – and until 1969, in New Orleans, I don’t think I’d ever heard the word actually used. I was not involved in the civil rights movement but was certainly not opposed to it. My hometown in upstate New York had few blacks, though in the mid-fifties our high school did have a black cheerleader. While I had no black friends as a youth, this was not by design, and when, in 1968, I met a black man (a fireman), I had no difficulty in forming a friendship – a friendship which has remained to this day.

So when I went to Nigeria I was neither anti-black nor an afrophile (a ‘lover’ of things black). Nevertheless, I immediately felt ‘at home’ there and because I went without prejudices, I was able to observe things with an unjaundiced eye; and I made some remarkable discoveries.

First, African blacks were not at all uptight about race; second, it was obvious to them that the white man was ‘cleverer’ – and, they were not the least bit uptight about this. Only later did I realize that racial ‘sensitivity’ was essentially a Western phenomenon with its roots in white guilt.

Few things I’ve learned in Africa are more important than this lack of racial sensitivity. Much of our ‘Western perspective is based on the ingrained assumption that blacks are deeply offended by any suggestion of racial differences; this in turn is based on the equally unquestioned belief – never examined – that the idea of such differences is morally offensive. To acknowledge that throughout Africa people are not uptight about race must have a profound impact on one’s thinking.

I spent the next five years at the University of Nairobi, where I began to observe things more carefully and eventually to formulate certain ideas. Everything I had noticed in Nigeria (about the lack of racial sensitivity, etc.) was confirmed, but it was in Kenya that I learned (e.g.) how Africans distrust each other, how little they confide in each other and how rarely they form real friendships.

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