Would Pope Francis wash Cardinal Burke's feet? Easter Tridiuum and so the Foot Washing is upon us again...

Easter. Bunnies. Eggs. Feet washing. 

Our Caudillo, Jorge, made headlines in the past with washing the feet of Muslims and so on during this strange "rite". I suppose it is too much to hope for any sort of real understanding about what it is for – or should be for.

The whole foot-washing thing is a simple example of our hierarchy's not following Our Lord's example, but rather reinventing Him to serve their own self-identities.

The feet-washing thing is for the hierarchy, with bishops washing priests' feet and the pope washing bishops' feet. It is symbolic of their "working relationship", with the superiors acknowledging that they're there in service their fellow clerics who are below them on the Church's totem pole. Washing parishioners' feet therefore misses the point that this is about Church leaders' relations to each other. Our Most Blessed Lord did not wash the feet of just anybody, of course. Somehow our current leadership seems to just not be able to read (or think) clearly about either Holy Writ or Holy Rite.

But ask yourself the simple question: would Francis was Cardinal Burke's feet, or Cardinal Sarah's? Haha, to ask the question is to answer it. But clearly THOSE are the feet he should be washing, and which he never will. Bergoglio's washing Muslim feet (and etc.) obscures the whole thing hopelessly.

I think this whole fiasco sums up Bergoglio's papacy: confused, misdirected, and most definitely misdirecting.

An Préachán

"Weird" Vatican developments and Hilary White's take on What's the Story with Joe...

(And yes, I use "weird" in both its modern and its ancient meanings.) 

 You-all may have heard of the latest odd Vatican development: Benedict's "forged" or "forced" letter about Francis' theology books. Father Zuhlsdorf has info on it here, and important links, as well:

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2018/03/more-of-and-about-the-letter-of-benedict-xvi-on-the-booklets/

See also Lifesite news: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/laura-ingraham-on-benedicts-doctored-letter-two-popes.-da-vinci-code-stuff

"Conservative" Catholics are up in arms, but the Trads aren't buying it, i.e. Hilary White's take:

http://whatisupwiththesynod.com/index.php/2018/03/13/from-ratzinger-to-bergoglio-just-the-next-step-in-the-logical-progression/

Is Hilary White, the author here, controversial? Sometimes, but honestly, when Hilary is right, she's right. She writes here about the current controversy of the "retired" pope endorsing the current pope's 11-volume theological work. Many are insisting "Father Benedict" really didn't endorse Pope Francis' -- er -- intellectual efforts. Rather, that he was forced, or that it was photo-shopped, etc. Hilary White isn't buying it. She makes the (unpopular among "Conservatives") case that Ratzinger was always a Vat2 Reformer, heart and soul.

An excerpt:

Why did Benedict resign? Why has he sat by passively while the Bergoglians eat the Church? And in a larger sense, why was Kasper never disciplined or removed from the College of Cardinals? Why were all the men whose names we know only too well allowed to continue attacking the Faith and the faithful for so many long years?

Because this is part of his programme. Bergoglianism is the logical conclusion of VaticanTwoism, and that, not the historic Catholic Faith, is what Ratzinger always believed in.

The truth is the man we loved never existed. He was created for us out of a blend of wishful thinking and secular media narrative, propaganda which we heavily bought into because we were terrified of the alternative. Well, here’s that alternative, grabbing us by the arms every day and screaming his blasphemies and heresies into our faces. The alternative is simply that the “conservative” proposal is false, based on false premises, a matter of clinging to our personal preferences in opposition to the evidence; a habit that I have called “Fantasy.”

An Préachán again:

She pulls no punches. Meanwhile, in shocking news, the Polish bishops are wavering on Holy Communion to divorced/remarrieds

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/polish-bishops-leaning-towards-allowing-some-remarried-divorcees-holy-commu

An excerpt:

Polish bishops appear to be showing support for allowing confessors to determine on a case-by-case basis whether remarried divorcees living in a state of objective adultery can receive Holy Communion.
In a statement issued after a two-day plenary meeting, the bishops stressed the importance of “discernment, accompaniment and inclusion” in dealing with such cases, according to the Polish Catholic website Pch24.

"Discernment"! "Accompaniment"! "Inclusion"! All the codewords that really mean: "We don't really believe this Eucharist stuff." Certainly, if they actually come out with this, they don't believe 1 Cor 11:23 (and following to the end of the chapter). And they break with Sacred Tradition as well as Holy Writ.

The $64,000 question is: If the Polish bishops cave to the consecration of sin, how long can the Chastisement be delayed? (See Fr Chad Ripperger on Holy Detachment and the coming Chastisement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3oqUkCm0i4 )

You know, in Islam, the Muslims have always said "Allah is merciful". They've never said, "Allah is love." Allah doesn't love, nor does he "do" covenants or make promises, even to bold mujahideen jihadi who slaughter many of us infidels. So "Allah is merciful!" is far more a desperate plea than a statement of theological fact. Maybe Francis in all this "mercy" talk (mercy which doesn't apply to Trads, obviously, and is highly selective in general) is on the same level?

The Good News, the Gospel, however, is that God uplifts human nature and transforms us (hence the necessity of the Incarnation, into which Baptism and the Holy Eucharist lead us), making us "New creations in Christ"; (2 Cor 5:17, and also throughout the New Testament, really, once you start looking for this teaching). The True God doesn't leave us wallowing in the pigsty of sin, oinking endlessly for mercy. It calls us to perfection in the here and now. See Matt 5:48; and Rev 5:10, plus many others: verses Bergoglio might well excise, if he could, as Luther tried to excise the Epistle of St. James.

In sum, the Gospel is far away from many, today. That's for sure.

3 As all things of his divine power which appertain to life and godliness, are given us, through the knowledge of him who hath called us by his own proper glory and virtue.
4 By whom he hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.
5 And you, employing all care, minister in your faith, virtue; and in virtue, knowledge;
6 And in knowledge, abstinence; and in abstinence, patience; and in patience, godliness;
7 And in godliness, love of brotherhood; and in love of brotherhood, charity.

3 Peter 1:3-7

Can there be a more succinct counter statement to the "Discernment"! "Accompaniment"! "Inclusion"! hogwash?

An Préachán

One Peter Five has a must-read article here on Pope Francis getting caught lying about the Bishop Juan Barros (the bishop of Osorno, Chile, that Francis stubbornly supports despite serious abuse allegations) mess. Check it out.

The demon promoting homosexuality had the Aztec name of Xochipilli. That translates as Flower Prince. Interesting that so many centuries later homosexuals were referred to as pansies and fruits. Seriously, it seems the demon "likes what he knows" and keeps a certain method of operation (MO) over the eons.

The Vatican II Church has clearly, in the worship of Xochipilli and all its other sick manias -- deeply, profoundly perverse manias, such as the insistence on a liturgy that is so banal and simply Protestant that it has driven away millions of Catholics ("Grace of Ba'al" Bugnini said: "We must strip from our Catholic prayers and our Catholic liturgies everything which can be the shadow of a stumbling block for our separated brethern, that is, Protestants." L’Osseratore Romano,, 19 March 1965, quoted in Michael Davies www.catholicapologetics.inf...
-- the Vat2 Church seems devoid of any self-criticism, any consciousness that it is a parody of the decomposing Anglican Church. It can't laugh at itself. It's so chock full of pride that it is the best case example of "Sin darkens the intellect" in all of history. (Well, next to Hitler and Napoleon invading Russia, maybe.)

But this is the scandal of scandals: the Sex Abuse Scandal. It's the worse thing that's happened to the Catholic Church since the French paid the Swedes to invade Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years' War (and probably the Reformation thrown in). And it is the gift that keeps on giving.

Just incredible. But "Evil will oft evil mars" and maybe that's what we're seeing in this instance.

An Préachán

The Traditional Latin Mass as Training for Heaven

Sometimes I’m asked “Why the Latin?” in regards to the Traditional Latin Mass, or more rarely, “Why all the rigmarole?” I remember a youngish nun (some thirty years ago now) asking in a very acidic tone, “What’s the point of praying in Latin?” Such questions, especially asked in that acerbic tone, remind me of a scene in one of those juvenile Austin Powers movies (I forget which one) where in Dr. Evil has concocted some bizarre method of doing away with Austin Powers, and Dr. Evil’s very American-like teenage son says in exasperation, “Just shoot him. Don’t go to all this trouble; he’ll likely escape anyway. Just shoot him.” (I’m paraphrasing from distant memory.) Dr. Evil stares in disgust at his son and says, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

I no longer remember now what I said to the nun, if anything, but perhaps, in that context and with that particular individual, this answer is as good as any: “You just don’t get it, do you?” In other words, she wasn’t disposed to hear a real reason; it was self-evidently stupid to her and she wouldn’t have been inclined to consider an explanation. It was inherently unreasonable to her. She was also a nun in the modern nun sense, no habit, no apparent religious status or affiliation at all. (I would never have guessed she was a nun if she hadn’t been introduced to me as such by an aunt.) But for everyone else in the world, for those Catholics or Protestants who might bring up why Traditional Catholics (and the Orthodox) prefer “all the rigmarole”, there is a very simple answer: the Mass is preparation for Heaven.

It’s not rocket science to figure this out, although it is spiritual science. God is a mystery; indeed, THE Mystery, and both humans and angels can easily spend all eternity in an eternal contemplation and communion with God and never remotely “know all there is to know.” (We can loosely “image” eternity with God, but we can’t really conceive it, any more than we can conceive of God.) That’s what the Old Mass – and of course the Orthodox liturgies – convey: we’re entering into the Eternal Presence and utter Mystery that is God. Yet it is essential to note that for Christians, God is in no way unknowable to us. In Islam, God is unknowable: the Islamic afterlife for men is a carnal one, and a man’s women from this life must endure forever their husband’s carnal frolicking with the legendary 72 virgins; but Allah is not there. Wherever Allah is; he’s far above the “Garden of Allah”. In the religions further Eastward, all human individuals lose their individual selves in maya, a spiritual non-existence of spiritual existence soup, with some of them perhaps to be reborn on Earth once again to do it all over.

In Christianity, however, God is a Person, indeed, Three Persons in one God, and we’ll spend forever in a most personal knowing – an eternal getting acquainted – of this Absolute Being. Angels do this already. Their minds are mirrored back to them in God, each of the nearly innumerable angels having his own presence in and with God. And they thus reflect the glory of God. The higher angels in the nine choirs shine more brightly than the lower ones because the hierarchy of Heaven gives each his unique place, closer in to or farther out from God, and of course all angels, being pure spirits, greatly reflect in their natures the received glory of the Absolute Spirit. (Even devils, according to one old tradition, can’t escape from the glory of God: the fires of Hell are nothing more than the very presence of God endured by those who have eternally rejected Him; I’ll pass on opining whether this idea is true or not, but it certainly makes sense: their rejection of God is eternal, but since God Himself is eternal, they can never escape His presence).

Human beings, those admitted to Heaven, can now participate in this Beatific Vision because of the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Holy Trinity is now a Man, both Man and God. But why was that necessary? God took on human nature in order to elevate human nature to the point where it could take on God’s divine nature, making us “new creations in Christ.” This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament. Examples: John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation.) St. Paul states it succinctly in 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” The chief of the Apostles puts it best in 2 Peter 1:4: “By whom He hath given us most great and precious promises: that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature: flying the corruption of that concupiscence which is in the world.” “Partakers of the Divine Nature.” (BTW, St. Paul mentions the idea quite often: see Romans 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12.) And to return to St. John for a moment, he goes into great detail, not only for the necessity of the Most Holy Eucharist in the 6^th chapter of his gospel, but – with this new creation idea in mind, reread the 3^rd chapter of his gospel about being “born again”.

In the Eastern Churches, this transformation in Christ is called Theosis, and in the West, Divinization, or more likely you’ll have encountered it as the “infusion of grace” by which we are saved. As “Divinization” may seem outlandish to some Catholics, recall St. Athanasius: "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460] and of course St. Thomas Aquinas: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]. The Incarnation made this infusion of grace possible, as through baptism Original Sin is removed, and then through the Holy Eucharist, we can receive into ourselves God Himself, transforming our nature to a higher form, one that can endure the Beatific Vision experienced by the Angelic Host. God’s Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist is the New Covenant, for the New Testament isn’t the 27 books of the Christian Bible but the Holy Eucharist itself. (The New Testament came to be called that because it describes God’s saving work through the Holy Eucharist.)

Of course, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have their differences, which in a mostly cultural and linguistic way existed before the split in 1054, and which has grown since, but both are “Christianity of the Real Presence”, unlike Protestantism, which although it is a direct offspring of Catholicism, is proudly the Christianity of the Real Absence. From Luther and Calvin on, the Real Presence of God in the Holy Eucharist is denied: whereas in Catholicism Christ is ontologically present, in Protestantism Christ is present only in a  mnemic sense – the memory of His life and death on Earth 2,000 years ago, so it exhibits quite a different understanding of the importance for the Incarnation. Whereas Historical Christianity teaches we are changed in our nature, Protestantism (generally) teaches our nature remains sinful and fallen, but God allows us into Heaven even so: thus Luther’s famous Simul Justus et Peccator, simultaneously justified with God and going to Heaven, but yet a sinner in our nature, as in Luther’s analogy of a manure pile covered with snow. (N.B. C.S. Lewis contested this idea in his 10^th letter in his Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer.)

Now, all this is truly a Mysterium Fidei, a Mystery of Faith, and the old Mass (and Eastern Liturgies) are our introduction to it, just as in them we receive Our Blessed Lord intimately, in Holy Communion. The old liturgy seems to the newcomer – especially a newcomer raised in the New Mass of Paul VI or the generalized Protestant worship services – to be arcane, esoteric, impenetrable, and mysterious. Latin itself is only one element of all of this profundity. Yet the Old Mass existed to introduce you to the Mystery that is God. (And the New Mass exists to remove the Mystery. But that’s a subject for another essay.) God is all these profound mysteries to us, and far more. The Old Mass is our boot camp, our basic training, for God’s eternity. And just as God is not “plain English”, not something “taken in at a glance”, so neither is the Old Mass.

"So preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women."

"Weak men and disorderly women"? Sound familiar? Isn't that modern Western culture? 

So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of European women on the verge of the French Revolution, quoted in an article here.

An excerpt:

Way back in the 18th century, Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and made an observation. It was at a time when the seeds of women’s equal rights were just being sewed. Men were beginning to see women as true equals, though obviously they hadn’t achieved that fullness yet. Equal rights would take many years, but America had a good start.

At that time, Tocqueville made an insightful observation when he compared America to Europe. The quest for democratic equality in Europe had taken a bad turn, as women were confusing equality with sameness (particularly in sexual relationships). “By thus attempting to make one sex equal [the same] to the other, both are degraded,” Tocqueville wrote, “and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.”

The main part of the article, America Needs More Ladies, by D. C. Mcallister, is about modern women in America. An excerpt:

Barbara Seaman, who wrote Free and Female, put it this way:

If there is going to be a breakthrough in human sexuality -- and I think that such a breakthrough might be in the wind -- it is going to occur because women will start taking charge of their own sex lives. It is going to occur because women will stop believing that sex is for men and that men (their fathers, their doctors, their lovers and husbands, their popes and kings and scientists) should call the shots.

This is the essence of modern feminism: women calling all the shots, in bed, in the home, in the workplace, and in politics. A woman is free to act however she wants to act, and men have to deal with it. As Madonna once said, “I’m tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.”

The feminist attitude ultimately demeans men, reduces them to sexual predators, and fosters distrust between the sexes. Robin Morgan, editor of Ms. magazine, expressed her disdain for men quite bluntly: “I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”

Andrea Dworkin carried it to another level of hostility when she wrote, “I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”

Another charming quote from a feminist “lady” came from Mary Daly: “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.”

Not all women feel this way, of course, but this is the tone of the feminist movement, and it has had an impact on women and how they treat men. Noonan spoke of respect and dignity. It’s very difficult for a man to show a woman respect when she doesn’t respect him and when she refuses to honor his dignity as a man. Even worse, she doesn’t respect herself or her own femininity, so why should a man?

 

"Oh brave new world that hath such creatures in it!" It that's not a simulacrum of Hell, what is?

An Préachán

Cri de cœur from One Peter Five's founder about the current state of the Church

I tend to be perhaps too optimistic at times. But there's always One Peter Five to bring me back the earth of our realities, as it were. Here Steve Skojec whips up a true Cri de Coeur about the current state of Holy Church.


The Comments are good, too.

How bad are things in the Church, though, really? Pretty awful. You may think Steve is overdoing it, but he isn't. However, being the phlegmatic character that I am, somehow I'm not losing sleep over it. No matter how bad things get, after all, we (Catholics and Orthodox) still have enough validly ordained priests around confecting the sacraments that God is truly with us in the Real Presence. That's better than the Protestants and their Real Absence. 

But they're suffering miserably, as well. Apostasy is in the air: the state is pagan, Gays are in your face, and Islam is at the gates. The time for blasé Catholicism has past; the time for heroic Catholicism has come.

And there's always surprises, such as: http://wdtprs.com/blog/2017/12/nuncio-in-switzerland-the-old-latin-mass-is-the-future-of-the-church/

There's always hope. And we've always prayer. So, get to it.

Otherwise, it's back to the beginning, actually. Lions, burning stakes. Nero. Caligula. Only we've got Islam to contend with this time around.

As Yogi Bera famously said, it's "deja vu all over again".

Happy New Year.

An Préachán

Professor spanks former student hard about "Historical Jesus"

Great article here from John Dickson, responding to a former student's "Jesus never existed" article that the Washington Post published here. The latter is a marvelously embarrassing example of the New Atheist stupidity, and John Dickson "pulls no punches".


Very, very worthwhile.


Here's an excerpt:

"Mythicists" are the historical equivalent of the anti-vaccination crowd in medical science. They are controversial enough to get media attention. They have just enough doctors, or doctors in training, among them to establish a kind of "plausible deniability." But anyone who dips into the thousands of secular monographs and journal articles on the historical Jesus will quickly discover that mythicists are regarded by 99.9% of the scholarly community as complete "outliers," the fringe of the fringe. And when mainstream scholars attempt to call their bluff, the mythicists, just like the anti-vaccinationists, cry "Conspiracy!" This is precisely what Raphael does when with a wave of his hand he dismisses the apparently "atrocious methods" of historians of Jesus. It is as if he thinks he wins the game by declaring all its rules stupid and inventing his own path. No, that is how you get yourself disqualified.

Secondly, no student - let alone an aspiring scholar - could get away with suggesting that Christians "ought not to get involved" in the study of the historical Jesus. This is intellectual bigotry and has no place in academia, or journalism. I would likewise fail any Christian student who suggested that atheists should not research Jesus because they have an agenda. Nobody in the vast field of historical Jesus scholarship operates with such an us-and-them mentality. This is why the methods of history are so important. They are how we assess each other's work. We don't fret about other scholars' private beliefs and doubts. We judge their handling of the acknowledged evidence according to the rules of historical inquiry. Anything else would be zealotry.

An Préachán

Interesting article that argues for voting for Judge Roy Moore over his Democrat rival

I've not been following this Roy Moore story much, what with all the sex scandals in D.C., it's sort of a bore. For example, I see now that Matt Lauer has now been exposed as a crazed sex fiend and that that scumbag Garrison Keillor has been fired for "improper behavior", I don't know anything about Lauer, never having watched "Today", but I used to listen to Keiller's Prairie Home Companion until in another venue I saw that he had written that "Republicans are Brownshirts in pinstripes", something so egregiously insanely stupid (like calling Trump a Nazi) that I immediately ceased any and all contact with Keillor. 

However, Judge Roy Moore is accused of trying to date teens back 40 years ago, and these were legal-aged teens and he asked their fathers, but only recently was he accused by two of these of some sort of sexual assault. Now the author of this piece below points out how common it was in the past for older men to try to marry much younger women, and he also details how shaky those two assault claims are, but for the sake of the argument, admits them, and then writes the following (highlights mine):

The question before us is whether one can still maintain faith and one’s moral integrity while voting for a lesser of two evils. The answer is, yes, in both cases.

All voting is voting for the lesser of two evils, and it’s almost never wrong to vote for the lesser of the two. There are no perfect candidates. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, sometimes bigly. Assuming Moore did what’s been alleged, let’s turn to his rival, Democratic candidate Doug Jones.

Doug Jones Is a Moral Monster Or Moral Ignoramus

Jones has gone on record that not only does he support abortion, but he supports unrestricted abortion, even opposing a ban on abortion after 20 weeks. This is morally equivalent to supporting infanticide. So either Jones knows exactly what he’s doing in supporting killing babies in utero but doesn’t care, in which case he’s a moral monster, or his moral compass is in such need of calibration that one should never trust his judgment in moral matters. Politics, of course, is inextricably bound with such matters.

In my mind, Jones’ position is so extreme that a vote for him is a vote for the greater of two evils by a wide margin. It’s hard to imagine much worse than the mass murder of innocents. That’s also not taking into consideration his many other views with which conservatives disagree.

Furthermore, there is no reason to think that Moore, as an old, married man, is still trying to have sex with teens. All the accusations target his early thirties before he was married. But Jones supports infanticide in utero today. Virtue-signaling Republicans condemning other Republicans for voting for Moore strike me as being more concerned about their own appearance than the seriousness of abortion and the mental state of someone supporting it.

Why are no Republicans or Democrats calling for Jones to step aside if not for the fact that they are really not that serious about the immorality of supporting infanticide in the womb? If Moore should step aside, so should Jones. Of course there is another alternative, one that I support: Elect Moore and support the Senate not giving him a seat. This would bring about another special election.

An Préachán again: He says the Senate should refuse to seat Moore but to that I'd say just two words: Al Franken.

Anyway, the article is worth a close read. The author is an associate professor of philosophy at Ouachita Baptist University. He is a former member of the 82nd Airborne Division, father of five, and a foe of political correctness. 

An Préachán

Germany's Troubles and the Dismal Reality of Modern "Democracy"

Germany is having troubles forming a government.

This article linked to above is just an overview it but lists various issues (such as immigration) and the different parties' problems with the issues, so it is a useful article.

Hmmm...modern politics. Let me quote from the Trad Catholic historian Henry Sire:

“…But one needs to say that what the modern world calls democracy is close to being the opposite. Parliamentary politics as they have developed today ensure that power is held not by the ordinary man but by a breed diametrically opposite: a breed consisting of the ambitious, the devious, the greedy, the loud-mouths, the aggressive, and the fanatical. If we look at the character of modern political life, we rather see it defined by the spirit of these than of the ordinary man."

I myself think very little of the British Parliamentary system of "governance by party". The U.S. system was designed (supposedly) to operate without parties. James Madison loathed "factions", i.e., parties. 

The U.S. House of Representatives was supposed to be just that: i.e., it is supposed to represent the people. not parties. The lower house of the British ('mother of parliaments') Parliament, the "Commons", represented not the people per se, as individuals, but the commoners as groups: peasants had no voice but business interests did, city burghers, trade guilds, the corporate medieval society. Lords of course represented the nobility, lay and clerical. But the people as a mass, as citizens -- they didn't exist as individual citizens: they were subjects of the crown. And of course the peasants had no representation at Parliament. They belonged to the land owners (either as outright serfs, or as free tenants, etc.).

Now I point all this out because I think this carried over into today's party system, for the parties don't represent the people either, but parties, i.e., their own interests, just like the Commons represented towns, districts, trades, & business interests. Clearly in the U.S. the American Blacks are still the "property" of the Democrats, who treat them as serfs. (And they'll do the same to the millions of Latin Americans they're importing.) They may no longer be slaves, but "The Party of Slavery, Sedition, and Secession" certainly treats them like some medieval churl class. Equally clearly, the GOPe (the Establishment Republicans) could care less about the actual people who vote for them: the GOPe represents business interests and party factions just as the Commons once represented such hierarchical groups in late medieval/early modern England.

Something else to point out, the U.S. Senate was NEVER supposed to represent the people, either, but rather the states qua states. The 17th Amendment (that made senators directly elected) was an outright treason against what the Founders envisioned and the great "deal" they made to get the states to ratify the 1787 Constitution in the first place. So was the 16th Amendment, which gave us an income tax: no greater power grab occurred in U.S. history except for the attempt to establish a national bank in the early 1800s and then the establishment of the "national bank" we have now, "the Fed" (Federal Reserve Board). (N.B. The Bank of England basically ran England from the late 1600s till the early 20th century, when WWI bankrupted the British Empire. Henry 8th replaced the medieval Engish noble oligarchy with an oligarchy of "squireens" he created through grabbing medieval Church land; that lot ran the place until James II//VII was deposed; with William of Orange as king, the Bank of E. was established and called the shots -- pretty much -- thereafter.)

So all this is prelude to Germany's troubles. The "English System" that has been so widely adopted in the world is coming up short for Germany (and that's obviously not good for Europe). Being a failure at actual democracy is built into the parliamentary system. Sire again:

The first of these mechanisms (of government systems to defend oligarchy) is the party system, which is nowadays regarded as an essential feature of democracy, but is in fact the chief device for keeping parliamentary politics undemocratic, for keeping them the preserve of professional politicians. It is the party system that prevents the people from electing genuine representatives and limits them to choosing among activists selected by party machines. Contrast this with the politics of ancient Greece, in which election was regarded as the mark of oligarchic states, while in democratic ones the rulers were chosen by lot. … It also promotes the influence of pressure groups, supremely in the United States, where the two-party alignment saves lobbyists the trouble of scattering their resources among several patrons, and ensures their maximum influence.

(After a discussion of how France adapted the parliamentary system since 1871, Sire writes:)…In Germany, after 1945, the leaders of the country were painfully aware that the only really popular government there had been in the recent past was Hitler’s, and they were determined not to make the same mistake again. They devised a system in which the people’ s will was to be guided by the wise and good, by whom they had in mind themselves: the capitalists, the bureaucrats, the academics, and those who share their view of how things should be done. In countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal, politicians have little idea of what democracy is, except that it is different from the Fascist past. The countries mentioned have combined to form a political union which is the showcase of modern pseudo-democracy, one that takes government further from the people and puts it in the hands of a political class.

…Everywhere the shock troops of the oligarchy are the journalistic profession, which thrives on the domination of affairs by facile and over-heated views. If an attempt were made in the Western world to introduce genuine democracy, representing ordinary opinion, one would find the journalists fighting in the last ditch to prevent it, rather like the armies of well-drilled henchmen who in Hollywood films immolate themselves in the service of the master-villain.

An Préachán again: As you can see, Henry Sire (of French ancestry, born in Barcelona, educated in England, etc, a true European.) gives a pretty dour and no-nonsense take on our presumptions. The basic underlying problem is just where government gets its authority from. In medieval and ancient times, the source of such was religion (basically, except for the classical Greeks) and today, since John Locke (1632-1704), we supposedly have government founded on the consent of the people. But in reality, as Sire details, oligarchy rules absolutely, and rules all to suit itself. Hence its hatred of any type of Donald Trump or Geert Wilders who threatens to upset the apple cart. (Sire's book, Phoenix from the Ashes, was published in 2015.)

Such is our world. Pompous, lying, self-flattered and flattering, essentially dishonest. Kinda like Pope Francis' inner circle, actually, come to think of it. (Talk about conforming yourself to the world!)

An Préachán