Marie-Antoinette in the Conciergerie

An engraving of the imprisoned Queen being consoled during prayer. Via Vive la Reine. It looks like she is having a vision of the Sacred Heart. Share

Ilhan’s Pirates Capture Minnesota

 From Tierney's Real News:

Police have not identified the shooters publicly. Police also said neither of the two shooting victims are students at Eden Prairie or Minnetonka. Police say that the victims are from St. Paul - which is miles away. Police responded to reports of gunfire outside Aerie Stadium at Eden Prairie High School at around 8:40 pm on Friday. The school grounds were cleared while the game was underway. Two Somalis from St. Paul who were “known to the cops” were transported to a hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.Eden Prairie is a suburb of Minneapolis. Minnesota Democrats love to blame the gun instead of the criminals and heathens behind the gun and cancel our traditions instead of defend our country! This is a major reason I finally left Minnesota in 2022! (Read more.)

 

From The Enterprise:

In February 2023, a copy of the Quran that a 14-year-old autistic boy had brought to his school in Wakefield, England, was dropped and lightly scuffed. No law in England makes that a crime. Within days, however, the boy had received death threats, and his mother stood before a crowd in a local mosque, with a police officer in the room, apologizing for what her son had done. A secular country watched a family submit to a blasphemy rule that Parliament had abolished in 2008.

Liberal societies measure freedom by asking what the state forbids. By that measure the Wakefield mother was free, and so, in the same sense, would be a Dearborn engineer who quietly stops ordering wine at company dinners. In either case, the state forbids nothing. Something else does. The economist Timur Kuran named the mechanism preference falsification in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies. People misrepresent their private views when dissent is costly, and each public act of conformity raises the price of dissent for everyone else. Moderates cannot find one another because each sees only the rest of the conforming faces. Outsiders mistake the conformity for consensus.

Selection, more than conspiracy, explains who sets those demands. The devout volunteer for the mosque board, write the checks, and teach the weekend and afternoon school. The moderate who disagrees rarely fights; he simply attends less, which is what Albert Hirschman called exit, and every exit leaves the institution more orthodox than the community it claims to represent. Gulf money and imams trained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan accelerate the sorting. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who helped found the European Council for Fatwa and Research in 1997, predicted that Islam would return to Europe through preaching rather than conquest. In France, Bernard Rougier’s 2020 study of the suburbs documented entire ecosystems of mosques, bookshops, associations, and sports clubs under Islamist rule. (Read more.)

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Your Life Is Not Wrong Just Because It's Hard

From Of Home and Womanhood:

People are overwhelmed and tired all the time. You would not simply say to someone in medical school that because it is hard, therefore it is wrong to do. Or someone running a marathon should just quit because it hurts. We constantly do hard, difficult, painful things, and that does not make these things bad, most of the time it means the opposite. And parenthood is the exact same way.

We should be able to say that motherhood can sometimes be exhausting without treating children as some sort of disease in which fewer children is the cure. We should be able to listen and offer help to mothers without just dismissing them for having what we deem “too many children”. So how many children exactly are we allowed to have before we lose the right to ever complain about anything? And why is it that motherhood seems to be the only difficult thing in life we treat as some sort of mistake, just because of how difficult it is? This and more is what we are covering in the podcast episode. We are talking about the double standards we have for mothers, why saying I am “overwhelmed” has somehow become a direct insult against how many children you have, and why most of all, I refuse to believe that the answer to the hard parts of life and loving others is to simply have less people to love. (Read more.)

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Understanding True Elegance

 

From Letters from the Old World:

While aesthetics are of great importance, the weight that gives them meaning comes from something much deeper than appearances. Elegance is not limited to clothing, although that is frequently the first impression a woman makes, and thus why the career woman reads as “aspirational” upon a cursory glance. True elegance, however, comes from a rightly-ordered life. This is why Girlbossing at the expense of home and children can never achieve the depth of elegance intrinsic to motherhood; mothers have earned a level of dignity and refinement through great personal sacrifice: their bodies, their focus, their nights, their mornings, their days and years.

All of the difficulty, all of the messiness, give the beauty of it a dimension that cannot be replicated by, “My boss was mean to me at work” or “I stayed an extra two hours at the office before coming home to cry and drink wine with my cat.” Underneath one life is a sense of vibrant fecundity, while underneath the other is the hollow realization that everything you have in the world is going to die with you. The deliberate uglification of motherhood has served to corrupt and subvert our understanding of these roots. It’s time our aesthetic perceptions better reflected the truth. (Read more.)

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Capital Punishment and the Order of Reason

 From Imperator:

The Church has always upheld, in continuity with Sacred Scripture and the wisdom of the Greco‑Roman tradition, that capital punishment is just when the sword is wielded by legitimate authority and ordered to the common good.

Echoing this perennial teaching, St Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa Theologiae that as minister of divine justice, the civil ruler may licitly take life when a malefactor’s deeds have gravely wounded the order of justice and threaten the community.

He teaches that one who threatens the harmony of the state has, by his own deliberate act, fallen away from the order of reason and thereby forfeited his claim to those goods that exist for the wellbeing of the political community. Such a man may therefore be removed by public authority just as a surgeon amputates a gangrenous limb for the health of the whole body lest it spread corruption throughout the entire organism.

He further affirms that capital punishment is not just retributive but also protective of the common good, since it restores the order of justice and prevents the spread of further evils, whether through recidivism or by the corrupting example given to others.

Aquinas is clear that in committing such acts, the life of the malefactor is forfeit, and their possibility of repentance does not override the community’s right to safety and security, nor the authority of the civil ruler to defend the commonwealth through proportionate punishment. (Read more.)

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Why Columbus Sailed West

 From The Western Spirit:

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic with three ships, hoping to find a new route to Asia, but instead reached the Caribbean and began a new chapter in the history of Europe and the Americas. What many people do not realize is that his voyage was connected to the centuries-long conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world that controlled trade routes to the East. For generations, European merchants depended on trade networks that connected the Mediterranean with the wealthy markets of Asia, but many of these routes passed through territories controlled by Muslim rulers, who profited from the trade.

Then, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, bringing the ancient Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire under Muslim rule and strengthening Ottoman control over trade in the eastern Mediterranean. European rulers already had good reasons to search for alternative routes to Asia, and the growing power of the Ottomans made the prospect even more attractive. While the Portuguese explored the possibility of sailing around Africa, Columbus proposed something much more ambitious: reaching Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.

The rulers who eventually agreed to finance his expedition were Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, who had just completed the Reconquista by capturing Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, in January 1492. (Read more.)

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Last Days of Marie-Antoinette

From All Things Georgian:

We move to her last few days and in a newspaper article referring to her time in the Conciergerie which confirmed that the total number of prisoners in Paris prisons at that time as being  some 2,989. Life, although extremely cramped, was described as being one of mirth and gaiety, guzzling Bordeaux with their dinner which was described as splendid and sumptuous, suppers consisted of ham and salad* – how accurate a reflection of the truth we could not say.

According to the St James’s Chronicle  of November 21, 1793  Marie’s situation was in stark contrast, she was confined to a small cell, half underground and a mere 8 feet by feet –

‘her bed was made of straw, one mattress and an old tattered coverlid, and terrible to tell she was continually and in all situations in the presence of four Gens d’Armes, who never quitted her chamber. Her food was such as given to common prisoners ; her health was visibly declining; her hair became grey;  and the monsters fearing her natural death might deprive them of  their wretched victim hurried her to the scaffold.

Some days before her death she was wearing black and even sleeping in her mournful attire, expecting every instant to be dragged from her bed of woe by executioners. She wished to die in mourning for her unfortunate consort, but the barbarous regicides deprived her even of this last consolation and compelled her to put on a white waistcoat’.

(Read more.)

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Muhammad & Marx

An interesting comparison, although there are those who question whether we worship the same deity as Muslims. The old crusaders saw them as pagans. From Tierney's Real News:

Look closely at how Islam began and how Communism began, and a clear pattern appears. Both took ideas that already existed and worked, then changed them so the founders and their followers could claim ownership and control. The result in both cases has been division.

Both men followed the same logic:

1. Take something that already functions.

2. Declare it incomplete or corrupt.

3. Supply a new, corrected version that puts the founder and his successors at the center.

4. Use that new version to bind followers together while separating them from everyone else.

The result is a system built for authority and control.

Both men also made a claim of exclusive, final authority. Muhammad claimed to be the last prophet, replacing Jesus Christ, and carrying all news laws from Gabriel. Marx claimed to have discovered the scientific laws of history that would end class conflict. Each claim demanded that everything before it be set aside. Nothing shows the pattern better than Muhammad’s use of Gabriel. (Read more.)

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An Aesthetic Call to Arms

 From Letters from the Old World:

Modern discourse understands that beauty and the divine are inextricably linked: as theologian and priest Hars Urs Von Balthasar said, “every experience of beauty, points to infinity”.

Why then do so many not make the connection between this truth and how they choose to dress? Is caring how you look always mere pride or vanity? Many assume so.

Often “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” is interpreted as “it’s only the inside that counts.” A moral truth is thus perverted into license for aesthetic neglect, as though appearance should not matter at all.

But you know this isn’t true. And so does God.

Consider the instructions for His sanctuary as described in Exodus; gold lamp stands decorated with flowers, colorful linen curtains, cherubim designs, leather and wood fixtures, etc.

Likewise, God commanded Aaron to wear sacred garments with “gold, and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and fine linen” so as to “give him dignity and honor.”

Clearly, presentation matters.

This is not a God who rejects the value of aesthetics, but one who understands and uses them to his own ends. In this way, beauty in appearance can reflect a divine purpose. God wanted his temple to be beautiful because it mattered that it was beautiful.

Today, we’ll show you that dressing well isn’t vanity, but in fact one of the simplest ways you can respect yourself, improve your community, and honor God.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand the theological importance of how you dress, and why you have a sacred duty to dress your best. (Read more.)

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