Nuns on TV

~


I once had a conversation with Mother Assumpta Long. And she looked through me, who thinks of myself as pretty comfortably opaque, as though I were made of glass.

She asked me some questions about my life that indicated that she knew instantly things about me that I didn't want anyone to know.

She's a power. I don't like the thing she's created. That order of cheerleaders gives me the screaming heebie jeebies for many reasons. I had a rather bad experience and left a vocations retreat of theirs, that was supposed to have been three days long, after fewer than 24 hours, though I had already been invited to apply.

But the woman who started the thing is a power.

It's not often I meet someone who has bigger and scarier mind powers than I.



~

Six more sleeps

Cheshire's area is 2,343 square kilometres (905 sq mi) and its population is just over a million.

Short story

The distance between the front door and the bathroom was only twelve paces. Short, indoor paces. She knew this because in moments of stress she had the habit of counting footfalls. Footfalls were real. They were the moment when the self connected with the external. She counted footfalls, the moment the heel struck the floor or the ground, because those were the instants when it could be concretely established that the self was also real. Twelve paces were twelve irrefutable instances of existence, which was, surprisingly perhaps, not always easy to establish.

Tonight, she wished that she did not know how many paces there were between the front door and the bathroom. How fast could that distance be traversed? The orange street light colour glowed in through the slats in the blinds. She could hear nothing, either from the bathroom or from the street outside. She was still standing in front of the door with her hand on the knob, listening. The only thing she could hear was her own heart and the sound of blood in her ears.

She stared through the gloom down her wide hallway. The twelve paces looked shorter tonight. The bathroom door was closed, it’s brass handle shone dully against the white painted wood. No light was on as she pulled the key out of the lock and quietly closed the door. It was hot, though it was nearly eleven.

When she was a little girl, she had been terrified of her grandmother’s bathroom. Her grandparents lived outside of town and in the autumn the wolf spiders would come inside where it was warmer. Up the drains they would climb, perhaps smelling their way forwards, up through a little circle of light and into the bath. For them, it was a trap. The claws on the ends of their legs could not find purchase on the smooth porcelain of the old white bathtub. A clawfoot bathtub.

...

more...



~

Ah yes, good old Italy...

never fails to disappoint.

The February 28 concert of the well-known band, specializing in performing baroque and late Renaissance music, in the Pantheon, was coming to an end, but a woman, apparently a Pantheon keeper, got onto the stage and said the concert was over, requesting everyone to leave the building.

She said the hall should be closed at 18:00. The audience of several hundred did not believe their ears and asked the musicians to continue performing, but another Pantheon employee, a man, stopped the concert again and told everyone to leave the building to the audience's indignant cries "Disgrace!"

"I sent a letter with apologies on my behalf and on behalf of the Cultural Heritage Ministry to the Russian musicians for the impermissible behavior by some Pantheon keepers who vulgarly interrupted the concert because the visiting time was over," Bondi said in an official statement distributed Sunday.

The video of the incident was posted on RIA Novosti's Russian-language website and on YouTube. The YouTube recording shows the woman appear on the stage at the time of 5:00.

Many Italians condemned the Pantheon keepers for the incident, writing that they were "ashamed to be Italian."

Don't worry about it. As an official representative of the Outside World,

I'm authorised to tell you, we're used to it.



~

Where do we begin?

~

So, it turns out that the Party That Must Never Be Named was right. Muslim Asian men in Manchester and other places in the north are in fact "grooming" young teenage white girls for use as prostitutes.

Why?

Well, Labour MP Ann Cryer is ready with the correct spin an answer.

It's all the fault of traditional Muslim Asian culture and their arranged marriages, see.

Because these men are all from "traditional" "conservative" Islamic families, they have their marriages arranged for them. This means that they can't sleep around when they're young like normal people, so, naturally, they turn to kidnapping, drugging and raping 14 year old girls, and forcing them into prostitution...

as you do.

"I am merely pointing out fact in saying that all the victims of these terrible crimes are white girls and all the alleged perpetrators are Asian men," she said.

"That is a significant fact and needs to be addressed."

In her view, young Asian men in traditional communities were unable to pursue casual relationships in the manner of their white peers because they were tied to arranged marriages.

Caught between two cultures, a small number were tempted to target vulnerable young girls, she said.

She was criticised by Muslim community activists, and a subsequent Channel 4 documentary focusing on the problem was pulled amid fears that it would hand political ammunition to the BNP Party that Must Never be Named.

~

The Summer Office

~


Many mornings, I work from the balcony of my apartment. The birds, the flowers, the sea breezes... beats the hell out of the train-o into Rome.



~

I've hit the big time

~

Well well. The godless...commie liberal mainstream media knows I exist.

I feel so special.


Maybe I'll have to start reconsidering that dream job.



~

I'm looking at you,

~


Santissima Trinita...



~

Streaming in...

~

Yep. Anglicans are coming into the Church in tens.

Tens of tens!



~

The Asteroid 101

~



Now, y'all know that I pretty much dropped the liturgical issues some years ago. I figure, it's not my department. You can't be everywhere and I am now surrounded by people who can (and do) write books on this stuff. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to keep my eyes from glazing over at the post-Mass pranza when they start going on (and on...and on...) about it. About ten years ago now I started the whole process of coming out of the Novus Ordo Matrix, did all the reading, came to the usual conclusions (it's not the same religion), had the usual crises, and generally went through the pain involved in swallowing that Red Pill.

These days, I am happy enough with my liturgical situation. Secure enough in what I've learned that I don't need to go stomping around telling people what's Really Going On in breathless stage whispers. I just don't attend that other thing v. often, and when I do, I'm fine with leaving the people around me alone about it. I just pick something in the church to look at, a statue or stained glass window or something, that gives no offense. I don't know enough Italian for anything the priest says to get under my skin.

One thing the Trad Mass has taught me is that the liturgy does not depend upon my minute moment-to-moment attention. It's OK to let your mind wander off.

Anyway, I'm surrounded, as I said, by experts whose job it is to worry about it. In the same way that I let the US writers pay attention to the US political scene, I let my liturgy friends do the liturgy worrying for me.

But a couple of weeks ago, I met a nice young fellow from a seminary in Ireland who had been taken along to a Trad conference by his grandparents, for a holiday, they said. I had seen him attending the conferences and had been briefly introduced, but on the last night, was seated opposite him at dinner and I suddenly found myself in the position of the one explaining the deficiencies of the New Rite and New Theology. He was a clever enough young fellow (working on a degree in math and physics) and had the Faith, so it was fairly easy to show him the more obvious logical and theological inconsistencies about what he had been taught about liturgy. It was pretty much Trad 101 stuff and he was willing to listen. He knows some Trads in the seminary and had been unimpressed with their conversation (I can imagine!) and explanations.

In the end, though, I could see that this was a young man who was never going to be satisfied with half-answers from either side of the argument. Ultimately, he was a nice young guy who wanted to know The Real and seemed willing to face the consequences of what he learned.

I asked him, "What is your intellect for?"

He replied, "To know God."

"Yes. When you seek to know God, do you seek only partial truths? Or do you want to know everything that is within your power to know?"

He didn't answer, but gave me a rather pained look.

At the end of the conversation, after rather easily batting away all his objections (he was only 19, after all), I told him, "Of course, there is no reason at all for you to do anything about this. You can secure your salvation in NewChurch. As you said, the Holy Spirit has rescued the NO Mass and the other sacraments from outright invalidity. You can lead a perfectly holy sacramental life in the new dispensation and go to heaven. You don't have to look up and compare the two texts of the Mass and see what was removed and speculate on why. You don't have to read the Von Hildebrands.

You don't have to ask yourself these difficult and frightening questions."

"I can take the Blue Pill."

"You can take the Blue Pill."



~

Today, Michael Voris offers a little short course in the Asteroid 101. How it happened, who the major players were and why they said they did what they did. Michael is a Reform of the Reform neo-con, but the information is there for the most part.

It's just a primer and It's pretty old hat stuff to me, but I guess there are still people out there like my young Irish friend who haven't heard it yet.

If you've got an hour to kill...



~