Wedding of Marie of Edinburgh

 

The three wedding ceremonies of the future Queen of Romania. From Royal Musings:

The bridal party arrived at the Stadkirche at 4:30 p.m, for the first religious wedding, a Roman Catholic ceremony. The "picturesque church" was overflowing with guests.  Kaiser Wilhelm II, dressed as an imperial Field Marshal, entered first, escorting the bride's mother, the Duchess of Edinburgh.  They were followed by the Duke of Connaught  with the Princess of Hohenzollern, Grand Duke Alexis and the Duchess of Connaught,  Prince and Princess Leopold of Hohenzollern,  King Carol of Roumania, Crown Prince Ferdinand, and the bride and groom's brothers and sisters. Princess Marie and her father, the Duke of Edinburgh, were the last to enter the church.

The marriage was conducted by the parish priest, and the nuptial address was given by the Abbot of the Benedictine Monastery at Beuron. Crown Prince Ferdinand's "Ja" was "heard distinctly all over the church," but Princess Marie's answer was "quite inaudible to those placed at any distance from the chancel." After they had "exchanged rings and clasped hands, Prince Ferdinand and Princess Marie, "rose as man and wife to the strain of the beautiful chorale "Laus tibi Domine." (Read more.)

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Baby Boom

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against President Trump’s executive order that sought to end automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal aliens and temporary visitors. The fake news media is celebrating as if this settles the issue forever, but that could not be further from the truth. This decision does not end the fight. It actually clarifies and strengthens the path forward.

What the fake news is not reporting is how we got here, where birthright citizenship came from to begin with, what prompted Trump’s EO against it, what the arguments were for and against, how honest leaders in America are reacting, what a doable workaround is, what are the next steps and if this means the fight is over or not.

So, let’s not join with the panicans and doomers who say the sky is falling - let’s look at the facts and make an informed decision. This is a complicated argument and there is no magic bullet.

I’m sure I’ll hear from some people who will tell me this newsletter is too long and they want me to cut it down to two paragraphs. Well, I can’t report all the facts in two paragraphs - that’s why the fake news is fake news. The TRUTH takes a little longer. So stay with me, please. (Read more.)

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I Think I Am Finally Beginning to Understand the Thirty Years War

 From Gruntled History Teacher:

Before the war, Germany was one of the richest and most developed regions of Europe, with an extraordinary medieval network of towns and trade networks that had grown up throughout the Middle Ages, and a convoluted constitutional system that defies explanation (then or now), but which actually worked better than is generally credited. But the Thirty Years War devastated large parts of the country so badly that, in German cultural memory, the 17th century is nearly as dark as the 20th.

It’s the war that tore Germany apart, and laid the seeds for later German national history, with all its accompanying baggage. But it also played a pivotal role in the nationalist histories of Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands. For the Enlightenment, it was the war that delegitimized Christendom and allowed science and reason to supplant religion. American religious freedom, pluralism, and toleration, have long been contrasted with the devastation of Europe’s wars of religion.

For military historians, the Thirty Years War has been the war that crystallized the military revolution and the rise of the fiscal-military state. International Relations theorists still describe the modern world as Westphalian, referring to the Peace of Westphalia that ended the war and established a system of sovereign states as the default international order. Catholic and Protestant historiographies naturally championed their respective sides, and all the major figures of the war have long been cast as heroes or villains according to whoever held the pen. The history of the Thirty Years War has been fought over and contested almost as much as the war itself. (Read more.)

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"Enchanted with Life"

Chateaubriand remembers Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France.

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.)

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Socialist Locusts

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

Almost 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.)

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The Challenge of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus

 From 1P5:

But 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.)

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History of the Christian Altar

 

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 "Fractio Panis" fresco in the Capella Greca of the Roman catacomb of St. Priscilla

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 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.

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.)

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The President You Elected Can Finally Run the Government You Voted For

 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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Nixon Threatened to Reveal the CIA's Involvement in the Kennedy Assassination

 From Stone Cold Truth:

A 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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