September 24 Feast of Our Lady of Walsingham

 Amici,

Today is September 24, the feast day of Our Lady of Walsingham. If you don't know the story, here's a nice video from a couple of years ago that explains the history of this amazing Marian Shrine, founded a thousand years ago in Norfolk, England, before the Norman Conquest, and suppressed completely by that wretched Henry VIII, who died saying, "All is lost – Kingdom, soul, life. Monks. Monks. Monks!"

The Story of Walsingham - Full EWTN Documentary 

If you watch this documentary, you learn the story of how one young Anglican vicar, significantly ecclesiastically named "Hope Patten", beginning in 1921, began to revive the pilgrimage – which sort of started up again on it own when Patten had a replica of the original statue of Our Lady and the Christ Child made. (The original had been burned up, along with the original Holy House, but the general appearance remained on Medieval seals.) His Anglican Bishop made Patten take the replica out of the local Anglican parish, itself a medieval survivor the Protestant Church of England "appropriated", as no "Mary Worship" was allowed in an Anglican Church. So, the enterprising vicar, with the name of "Hope", began building a shrine for it nearby, and the rest is, lo and behold, history. 

But prior to that, and again, profoundly Providently, an English lady named Charlotte Boyd, interested in Medieval ruins, bought an old, tumble-down stone barn standing out in the fields. It turned out to be nothing less than the Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Patroness of Pilgrims, otherwise known as the Slipper Chapel, part of the colossal Medieval Shrine Complex. (One huge arch of the Medieval Abbey still stands, which gives one a staggering idea of its gargantuan scale.) She began its restoration as a Church for Mass yet the local Catholic bishops wouldn't let it be used until the 1930s. You see, they told her, "But no Catholic families reside today anywhere near Walsingham." (Henry the VIII had been successful, though two hundred years after his demise, the great Protestant revivalist John Wesley preached that if "There had been a grain of virtue...in Henry VIII, these noble buildings need not have run ruin."

And you will learn to some extent the incredible modern-day popularity of the Catholic Shrine to people from around the world, such as the Charismatics, who are indeed mentioned. This being EWTN, though, Traditional Catholicism is played down or not mentioned (caveat: I suppose I could have missed it).

Whatever.

 

Walsingham had been one of the three greatest Medieval pilgrimages, and for about 400 years absolutely nothing went on there except the normal life of a very small English village. I've never been there, myself, or to Knock in Ireland, for that matter (the architecture there – just looking at photos of it – wallops me with something resembling an epileptic attack/tremens; it is so Modernist, it's Lovecraftian, I swear!). However, I did do the pilgrimage to Loch Derg, a.k.a. St. Patrick's Purgatory (though the cave of that is closed), and spent three nights barefoot in the rain. It was, to be sure, the most "Celtic" thing I've ever experienced.

So, may Our Lady of Walsingham succor for England – an abject, pitiful place ruled by Godless bureaucrats and overrun with Muslim hordes, but once known as "Our Lady's Dowry" – a return to its True Faith. Like her Son, she never gives up on us.

Amen.

AnP

 

Section Two of More Thoughts on the Irish vote...

Part 2 A bit more detail:

When the French Revolution began and the revolutionaries closed the Irish seminaries on the Continent, the English took the opportunity to "make a deal" with the Irish. “We'll give you a seminary in Ireland (that would be Maynooth) and allow you to have bishops and even build churches, all that, but in return you have to stop all this independence nonsense, and that includes suppressing the Irish language and the native culture.” Why? Why make that a condition? Because the Irish language and the Irish-Gaelic culture it embodied made the people <i>NOT English</i>. The Irish could never become "West Britain" while speaking a "foreign" language and having an outlandish culture.

I mean a culture, you must remember, that was rooted so long ago, and tested so brutally in the 300 years previous to the Famine in the 1840s, that it had made one people (excepting the Orangemen in the North, who were Scottish implants) where before they had been an endless series of tribes, clans, and ancient kingdoms. (Here’s a tidbit for you: if you want to see what Ireland looked like on a map in terms of tribes and kingdoms, look at a map of the Irish dioceses; forget the counties – those were English creations. https://www.catholicbishops.ie/dioceses/  Raphoe was the O'Donnell territory, Derry the O'Neill, and so on.)

So, the Church agreed with this pact with the Freemason-ruled Mother England. They made a pact with the Devil Himself, and -- aside from a few famous exceptions such as Archbishop MacHale of Connacht, born when the French Revolution began, 1789, and dying in 1881) the Church leaders bent over backwards to get rid of anything 'Irish" -- the language, An Ghaeilge, agus gach rud eile go leor, i.e., the whole that made the Irish a "community" connected to their past. This was psychological warfare, and a preemptive attack on the Irish national identity. It is part of the reason why Ireland isn't like Poland or where I reside now, Hungary. In these two countries, the Church supported their indigenous populations and their ancient languages. But the Irish Church drove a stake through the heart of Éire.

Then the Famine hit, <i>an t-Ocras Mór</i>. Now, here are some stats you've never heard, not least because the Irish are loathe to know them. In 1840, the country had a population of about 8 million people, and of those, we don't know (no question about language existed on the census in those days) how many spoke Irish, but the Guesstimate is that about 4 to 5 million of them spoke Irish. The entire western half of the country (with a high-density population and where people married very young and had lots of kids) spoke Irish, and it was also existing in strong pockets throughout the east side, and even in what is now the Six Counties. In other words, and read this twice, there were more people speaking Irish in Ireland than the entire population of Holland and Sweden combined, or that of Holland and Portugal.

Think about that.

Ten years later, in 1850, the population was 5 million. Most of those who died (either starved or dying of the resulting diseases) were Irish speakers. So were those who managed to emigrate on the "coffin ships". This is, my friends, the greatest language shift in European history, bar none (in terms of numbers and the short time in which it occurred). AND the English exported food from the country throughout the Famine. (The only country in Europe where that occurred; the potato blight infested all Europe.) The Famine was intentional. John Bull took advantage of his opportunities.

And the Irish seem to have either forgotten it entirely or have some in-built psychological block not to "get it" or even care. It's a ghost that only haunts the hills, not the nightclubs. No doubt the Church's position -- well established by then -- played a significant role in this.

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

The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church Cuid a hAon

The Shadow of Ireland over the American Catholic Church, Part I

I’ve read a lot on Irish history, and one can indeed look at it as James Joyce did, as a “nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” But then I'm also an Irish speaker, unlike that lout, so I'm always quick to point out one could say the opposite, and argue that a small country next to a massively bigger one, and that was repeated invaded, smashed, raped, used as a “cash cow” and cheap food source for 800 years or so, yet was able to come back and get freedom from most of its territory – that seeing Irish history that way is to understand that it was not a nightmare, but a miracle.

Ireland beat the odds – up to a point. Scotland didn’t. It’s still attached, and Wales never got free. Yet Wales has the largest Celtic language-speaking population of all the ‘Celtic” countries, and Scotland, well, I’ve been there often but mostly to the West. Sad thing about Scotland was it could have been Europe’s Singapore. Instead it is a “Socialist Satrapy”. Ireland, too, could have been Europe’s Singapore, but after 800 years of fighting for their freedom, they turned around and surrendered entirely – but not to “Mother England” but rather to “Europe”, an amorphous something or other that seems to loathe itself and wants to transform itself in “Eurostan”.

Yet for their small size, Ireland and Scotland actually have had relatively influential historical effects on a wide range of things. Descendants of both countries make up significant elements of the populations of the U.S., Canada, and Australia and New Zealand. Adam Smith, the moral philosopher remembered for his Capitalism teachings, and that complete idiot “La Bon David” Hume who denied causation and devastated modern philosophy (good or bad or merely whimsical, that’s quite an achievement).

Ireland produced Edmund Burke, who greatly affected what is called “conservative” in the American and English political world. It was Edmund who gave compassion and sanity to the ideas of that old devil John Locke, the founder of what in America is called Libertarian political philosophy. (Tom Jefferson, the "Deist" or "Atheist Waiting for Darwin" was Locks' most famous pupil – and that's fitting because Johnny wanted to get rich via the slave trade and Tom actually owned slaves, so, "soul brothers", as it were.)

“Conservatives" since Burke, I think, are pulled between the Libertarian extremes of Locke and the calm sanity of Burke. It’s been said that Locke was an amazing philosopher, for despite being completely wrong in his theory of knowledge and most everything else, his teachings have had the greatest effect on modern life of any one (more or less) "modern" philosopher. To the extent that is true, Burke was right in his ideas and his effects are more subtle, but one hopes more long lasting.

In any event, modern Ireland, had it managed to return to its native language, Irish, would have stood along side of Poland and Hungary (and others such as the Baltic countries, Finland included, and some of the Balkan ones) as a significant contributor to national identity. Instead, most of what the Free State (from 1922 to De Valera in the ‘30s, and then the “Republic” – always just called “the State” – from post-World War II to Ireland’s submission to the EU) did for the language was to try to kill it. It’s a long, utterly miserable and wretched story that I’ll bypass for now.

Yet one profoundly important “cultural” effect the Irish had was on Catholicism. And we can definitely trace the shallow, soulless Catholicism of so much of the U.S. Church and the Church in Ireland itself (and in Scotland, where most of the Catholics were of Irish descent) much of England (excepting the “old English” Catholic roots that never quite died out) and of course Australian and NZ.

What was it about Irish Catholicism that was so debilitating for the Faith?

See Part II.

An Préachán