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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