After his presentation to Louis XVI, Chateaubriand passed through the gallery to meet the Queen returning from chapel. “She soon came in sight,” he says, “surrounded by a large and brilliant suite; she made a dignified courtesy, appearing enchanted with life. And those fair hands, which then held so gracefully the scepter of so many kings, were, before they were tied by the executioner, to patch the rags of the widow, the prisoner of the Conciergerie.” (Read entire post.)Share
From Unlicensed Punditry:
ShareAlmost everything that makes Paris instantly recognizable predates modern socialism by centuries. Notre-Dame was built by the Catholic Church beginning in the twelfth century. The Louvre began life as a royal fortress under the French monarchy. The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by Napoleon. The grand boulevards of Paris were carved through the city under Napoleon III. Even the Eiffel Tower—the youngest landmark in the cartoon—was built by Gustave Eiffel’s private engineering company for the 1889 World’s Fair, decades before democratic socialism became a meaningful political force in France.
Socialists did not build Paris. They inherited it.
They are like a swarm of locusts - or those aliens from the Independence Day movies.
They flock in, consume the crops, and move on to the next field.
More importantly, they inherited the wealth that made Paris possible. The city’s monuments, museums, churches, bridges, and boulevards were financed by centuries of commerce, manufacturing, private enterprise, skilled craftsmen, merchants, engineers, architects, religious institutions, and, yes, governments taxing an increasingly productive economy. Whether one admires monarchies or not, the wealth that produced these works was created long before the modern welfare state existed.
This illustrates a common rhetorical sleight of hand. Advocates of socialism frequently point to prosperous Western nations with generous welfare systems as evidence that socialism works, while quietly overlooking the fact that those societies became wealthy before they dramatically expanded redistribution. The prosperity came first. The welfare state came later. (Read more.)
From 1P5:
ShareBut as with everything Catholic in the Americas, devotion to the Sacred Heart long predates the United States. Although Spain opened up the Evangelisation of the Western Hemisphere, it was in New France that this devotion took root, with the arrival of St. Marie de l’Incarnation, who founded the Ursuline Order in Canada in 1632, half a century before Our Lord began appearing to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Nine years later, Catherine Symon de Longpré, Mother Catherine of Saint Augustine in religion, brought devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary to Canada, along with her veneration for Marie des Vallées, with whom she was in contact.
On March 17, 1727, King Philip V of Spain, grandson of Louis XIV, wrote to Benedict XIII, asking him to approve the Office and Mass of the Sacred Heart for the kingdoms and states of the Spanish Crown – the bulk of these were of course Spanish America and the Philippines; from this time on, the cultus of the Sacred Heart had official approbation in the Viceroyalties of the Americas.
In the newly independent United States, the Jesuit Mission at Conewago, Pennsylvania was renamed in honour of the Sacred Heart in 1787, when a new church was built. A minor Basilica to-day, it was the first parish church named after the Sacred Heart in the United States – and possibly in the Western Hemisphere.
Inspired by the French Voeu Nationale, Gabriel García Moreno (1821-1875), President of the Republic of Ecuador, consecrated his country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He was assassinated two years later, as he left the cathedral of Quito where he had just completed his customary adoration. But he established what became the template for National Consecrations to the Sacred Heart across the globe. In keeping with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque’s request to Louis XIV, it was done by both the Head of State, the Legislature, and the Bishops of the Country. This emphasises that the Faith ought to encompass both Church and State. Following Ecuador’s example, several Central and South American countries undertook this national consecration in the following years – the first being the Republic of El Salvador in 1874. (Read more.)
From Shawn Tribe at The Liturgical Arts Journal:
Altars are (or ought to be at least), architecturally and liturgically, the central focal point of the interior of our churches. Given their evident importance, it is no surprise that there can be much in the way of disagreement as to what the ideal form of the altar is. Debates rage about free-standing altars versus altars with grand reredoses attached to them.
It was through the consideration of the different forms of the altar, particularly through the pursuits of the Liturgical Movement, that the idea arose of taking a brief look at the history and development of its forms. I. Early Christian Antiquity If we look to the earliest time of Christian antiquity, there are two early forms of altar that can be identified. One is those of the house-churches, which were wooden and in table form. Some of the Eucharistic frescoes of the Roman catacombs may give some sense of this form:The second form was the use of the stone tombs of the martyrs as altars. This custom is thought to trace to the first quarter of the 2nd century. Marble tops were placed upon the tombs for the Mass to be celebrated upon.
The "Fractio Panis" fresco in the Capella Greca of the Roman catacomb of St. Priscilla The Fractio Panis fresco of the Capella Greca, which belongs to this period is located in the apse directly above a small cavity which Wilpert supposes to have contained the relics of a martyr, and it is highly probable that the stone covering this tomb served as an altar. (The Catholic Encyclopedia)(Read more.)
At San Clemente in Rome, although the church was built facing west, Mass was offered facing east. The congregation would face east as well. From Shawn Tribe at The Liturgical Arts Journal:
I cannot definitively explain why the church was laid out this way as a glance at the property would suggest that it could easily have been orientated, which is to say, designed so that one's movement through the church was from west to east, toward the rising sun. All the churches built by Constantine in Rome were laid out "backwards" this way (except Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which was built into an existing building), and I can only guess that this was done in part to imitate the Temple at Jerusalem.Share
There are other possibilities as well. The priest offering the Holy Sacrifice is facing east, of course--the design of the altar makes it impossible for Mass to be offered any other way. It is thought that in antiquity the assembly would actually turn around and face east with the celebrant, putting the Sanctuary behind them. This is not as strange as it might at first sound. A shepherd is always behind his flock. This is why the celebrant always comes last in procession. Furthermore, the church building symbolizes the Barque of Peter. In fact, the word nave derives from the Latin navis, which means boat. So the Sanctuary is where the helm in an ancient ship would be--at the back.
We have a dual movement, then. We move into the church building toward the west, and then we turn around at a certain point in the liturgy and proceed east. Now consider for a moment St. Germanus' text. He says that the Sanctuary is an image of the tomb in which Christ was buried; the Altar is "the spot in the tomb where Christ was placed"; and the apse corresponds to the cave in which He was buried. So perhaps our movement from east to west toward the Sanctuary, toward the setting sun, is actually a representation of our burial with Christ. And turning around and proceeding east, toward the rising sun, represents our sharing in His Resurrection. (Read more.)
From Alexander Muse at The Enterprise:
Today the Supreme Court did something rare. It admitted a mistake that had stood for ninety-one years, and it corrected it. In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6-3 majority overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 decision that allowed Congress to wall off the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission from the President who is supposed to direct them. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, did not nibble at the edges of that old precedent. He buried it. “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s,” he wrote, “we overrule it.” The sentence is worth pausing on, because finality of that kind is unusual from a Court that prizes its own continuity. The Chief Justice was telling the country that a structural error had at last been set right.
To see why this is restoration rather than revolution, begin where the framers began, with a single sentence. Article II opens by vesting “the executive Power” in a President, and it later commands that he “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Read those two clauses together and a simple question follows. If a President is charged with seeing that the laws are faithfully executed, what happens when the officers actually executing those laws defy him, or simply ignore him, and he cannot remove them? The answer is that the duty becomes a fiction. A man held responsible for an outcome he cannot control is not truly responsible at all. The framers understood this, which is why they did not scatter the executive power among boards and commissions. They concentrated it in one person who could be watched, praised, blamed, and ultimately voted out.
Alexander Hamilton made the point with characteristic bluntness in Federalist No. 70, a passage the majority quotes today. A “plurality in the executive,” Hamilton warned, not only weakens government but “tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.” Consider what he is describing. When power is divided among many hands, and something goes wrong, each hand points to another. The citizen who has been harmed cannot find the person to hold accountable, because accountability has been diluted to the point of disappearance. Hamilton thought this the great vice of committee government, and he designed the presidency precisely to avoid it. A single executive cannot pass the buck, because there is no one to pass it to. (Read more.)
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From Stone Cold Truth:
ShareA stunning, long-overlooked Nixon Watergate-era tape shows Richard Nixon warning CIA Director Richard Helms that he knows of CIA involvement in the murder of John F. Kennedy- “I know who shot John.” This shocking new tape depicts Nixon increasingly besieged by Watergate but unaware that at least four of the Watergate burglars were still on the CIA payroll at the time of the break-in, and that the CIA had thus infiltrated the burglary team. Recently declassified documents reveal that Watergate Special Prosecutor Nick Akerman was aware of both the CIA’s advance knowledge and involvement in the break-in — but said and did nothing.
Senator Howard Baker, the Republican Leader on the Senate Watergate Committee and his counsel Fred Thompson himself, a future U.S. Senator from Tennessee, like Baker, stumbled on the CIA's deep advanced knowledge and direct involvement in the Watergate break-in. Baker and Thompson both knew that at least four of the Watergate burglars were on the CIA payroll at the time of the break-in and that through CREEP Security Director James McCord, had infiltrated the burglary team. Senate Watergate Committee Chairman Sam Ervin stoutly refused to allow Baker and the Committee Republicans including Edward J. Gurney of Florida the right to publish a Minority Report which noted this stunning information regarding the CIA.
Nixon deeply distrusted the CIA because he knew that President Eisenhower had ordered the agency to give top secret briefings to both Nixon and Kennedy after both were the certain nominees of their parties. Nixon was sore that Kennedy utilized the information in their debates, attacking Nixon for being "soft" on communist Cuba, knowing full well that Nixon had chaired a working group as Vice President overseeing preparations for the "Bay of Pigs" invasion. Nixon, of course, could not reveal this upcoming attempt to topple Castro in the details. (Read more.)
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| From the dining room at Petit Trianon |
Left to rack and ruin for the best part of two centuries, the Maison de la Reine, Marie Antoinette’s country retreat on the fringes of the Château de Versailles, has finally been restored to its former glory, thanks to a major £326 million renovation. Built between 1783 and 1787 as the extravagant centrepiece of the Hameau de la Reine, a model ‘village’ and folly of epic scale complete with a (decorative) windmill, sheep trussed up in silk ribbons, a cluster of farmers’ cottages and working farm, the Queen’s House had lain empty since 1848 when the Dior Foundation stepped in three years ago intent on rescuing it from certain ruin and giving it the regal makeover it so begged for.
Secreted in the sprawling gardens of the Petit Trianon, away from fawning courtiers’ prying eyes, the Hameau was Marie Antoinette’s refuge from Versailles’s folderol – for the two short years she got to enjoy it – and only a handful of her closest confidantes were allowed in its inner sanctum, the Maison de la Reine. Conceived with little thought for longevity, the hamlet fared poorly in the post-Revolution years and was all but a crumbling heap when Napoleon ordered a full restoration in 1810. Never one for sentimentalism, the emperor had the most ramshackle structures summarily torn down. Another renovation followed in the 1930s, courtesy of John Rockefeller. Part of the complex was refurbished in the late 20th century and the farm rebuilt in 2006. (Read more.)
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| From the Queen's house at the hameau |
From James Howard Kunstler:
Okay, convince me that gay-Islamic-race-communism is a “progressive” political program America is going to buy like corn flakes. The Lefty-left wants to think so, as it lurches from one peak of mental illness to an even greater one in the 130 days to the midterms. Look how successful they’ve been with open borders, defunding the police, men in the girl’s swim lane, no cash bail, sex-change surgery for kids, free-for-all elections, hatin’ on white people, and open Medicare fraud. The new re-branding strategy as “Democratic Socialism” only tells you that reality has ceased to interest them.
No, winning electoral districts stuffed with illegal aliens in bright blue cities with tiny overall voter turnouts won’t sweep the nation like love. More likely it’s a harbinger of the party’s approaching death, like the Whigs going down the drain in 1852, gurgle-gurgle. Advocating to destroy American society is a poor sales pitch. The party’s old-line leadership frantically seeks some way to neutralize the rising influence of Zohran Mamdani and his disciples, but so far nothing works. An odor of desperation fills the air.
One thing you can say about the gay-Islamic-race-communists is that they are well-organized, which is understandable since their political program resembles an ant farm, a dis-individuated collective with insectile characteristics, workers and soldiers toiling in mindless solidarity to occupy more electoral territory so as to vanquish their “oppressors,” Trump and the big feet of his capitalist minions. (Read more.)
The entire article is available to subscribers only but it is still interesting. From Raymond Ibrahim:
As Britain enters yet another moment of political upheaval following the announced resignation of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a deeper question remains unresolved: what exactly is England’s national identity — and who gets to define it?
Take England’s oldest national flag: the red cross of St. George on a white field. It has become the center of controversy in recent years and is seen as one of Britain’s most contested symbols.
For those raising the flag through campaigns like Raise the Colours, it represents pride in England’s heritage, unity, and unapologetic patriotism. Critics, however, brand it a symbol of “far-right” extremism, racism, and hostility toward migrants (the vast majority of whom are Muslim).
Indeed, just a few days ago, a Liberal Democrat-led Oxfordshire County Council sought a High Court injunction to ban the flying of St. George’s Cross and Union flags on or near public roads — claiming they “intimidate residents,” create safety risks, and cause “fear and division.” Many Britons see this as the latest front in a broader effort to suppress English identity amid the nation’s ongoing migrant crisis.
Yet the St. George flag’s true origins reveal a deeper irony largely forgotten by both sides.
Born in the crucible of the crusades, it originated as an emblem of holy war.
The Knights Templar, founded in the early twelfth century, were the first to adopt its colors. As monks, their white mantles symbolized purity; as warriors sworn to fight Muslims to the death in defense of Christendom, the blood-red cross symbolized their readiness for martyrdom (which many experienced). (Read more.)
