Coronation of Louis XIV

Via Tiny-Librarian: "On June 7th, 1654, Louis XIV was crowned King of France. He had been King for eleven years already, but having turned 15 (he would be 16 three months after his coronation) he was declared to be 'of age' to rule on his own without a regent." Share

Frank Marshall Davis and Catholicism

This article sheds light on our present situation. From Crisis:

Frank Marshall Davis’s vision was a very far-left one. He pushed the federal government to adopt socialist policies, with more and more power concentrated in Washington. He wanted the United States to go the direction of the Soviet Union. And Davis understood that the one institution standing in the way most vehemently was the Roman Catholic Church. “The Catholic hierarchy,” he sneered, had launched a “holy war against communism.”

Indeed it had—and deservedly so. Nothing anywhere in the world persecuted the religious—and people generally—quite like communism. The Church correctly saw Soviet communism as truly, genuinely evil. But Frank Marshall Davis fully disagreed, and he would target the Church as an obstacle to his plans to fundamentally change America.

And so, Davis targeted the Church in commentaries he wrote for the Chicago Star, the Communist Party publication of which he was the founding editor-in-chief from 1946-48.

[...]

Another Catholic target of Davis was Archbishop Stepinac of Yugloslavia. The suffering Stepinac was persecuted in a classic communist show trail, a terrible miscarriage of justice. Frank Marshall Davis, however, portrayed it the other way around, as did the Kremlin and the international communist movement. In a September 1949 article titled, “Cold War in Church,” written for the Honolulu Record, Davis dismissed Stepinac’s persecution as a “lie” and “propaganda.” That is, lies and propaganda from Rome, from America, from the West. As always, Frank Marshall Davis took the side of the Soviet Union against the Roman Catholic Church. (Read more.)

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The Comtesse de Provence

An engraving of Madame, as the eldest sister-in-law of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette was called. (Via Vive la Reine.) Share

A Rant on Weight

While health is important, we are obsessed with weight in our society, our own and other people's. To all women and girls: please do not let anyone use your weight as a means to control you by making you feel guilty, or unlovable, or unattractive, or unsuccessful because they have decided that you are "fat." If you want to lose weight because it will help you to feel better and have more energy and therefore accomplish more, then that is good!! But don't lose weight because of other people and what they say or think. People who really love you will love you no matter what your weight is! People who are going to criticize you will do it even if you become as thin as a supermodel! Weight has become a tyrannical social control over women in our modern society, worse than any real or imagined grievances of the past. Whatever your weight is, true beauty comes from within! Share

1965: The Dawn of Our Current Age

From Crisis:

The era of protest also heralded the youth rebellion. Seen in a more limited way for the first time in American history in the 1920s, it was a much more widespread phenomenon in the 1960s. Right after 1965, it erupted.

Indeed, it was in 1965 that the counterculture emerged. At the beginning of that year, hardly anyone had heard of it. By 1966, it was splashed all over. Suddenly, the hippies, Haight-Ashbury, the new “non-conformism,” and spreading illicit drug use became engrained in the national consciousness. After 1965, the “look” of the counterculture was evident everywhere, as the standard conservative dress and appearance—especially among the young—metamorphosed into long hair, beards, and dress for women that would have been unthinkably provocative before. The mini-skirt made its appearance in America in 1966, reflecting in some sense a relaxed sexual attitude. It was a veritable fashion revolution. It also was in 1965, Patterson tells us, that we saw for the first time partial nudity in a mainstream movie and a major pop music hit that featured sexual suggestiveness. After that, the floodgates opened. (Read more.)

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Obscenity

I had originally decided to ignore the obscenity that now desecrates the work of the great Le Nôtre, the gardens of Versailles. Then I discovered that works by the same "artist" are all over the gardens, therefore I must express my outrage. To quote the Daily Mail:

Dirty Corner (Le Vagin de la Reine) is set to officially open to the public next week but shocked locals have criticised the structure. Many complained that the adult sculpture has been located so close to the opulent Palace of Versailles - a UNESCO's World Heritage site and one of the largest and most opulent castles in the world. With 15 million visitors a year, many of which are families with young children, bloggers have protested that it clashes with the attraction's family values and have called for as boycott. François de Mazières, Versailles's mayor and MP of Nicolas Sarkozy's rightwing Républicains party, tweeted that he thought Kapoor had 'slipped up' over statue. But others disagree and have hailed the artist as a 'genius provocateur'. Whether love it or loathe it, locals have been discussing the artwork which is sure to get big crowds when it does open on Tuesday. Kapoor's last giant sculpture, Monumenta unveiled at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011,was seen by almost 300,000. (Read more.)

What would possess the French to sully their own heritage with such monstrosities? As for the latest pile of filth designed to once again soil the memory of the Queen-Martyr, it fills me with sorrow to know that in the place where she once walked with her own children there now sits an ugly piece of junk from the pit of hell. People have lost their minds. And the Revolution triumphs once again over that which is good and beautiful. Share

Johns Hopkins and Sex Surgery

From First Things:

Until 1975, when I became psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, I could usually keep my own counsel on these matters. But once I was given authority over all the practices in the psychiatry department I realized that if I were passive I would be tacitly co-opted in encouraging sex-change surgery in the very department that had originally proposed and still defended it. I decided to challenge what I considered to be a misdirection of psychiatry and to demand more information both before and after their operations.

Two issues presented themselves as targets for study. First, I wanted to test the claim that men who had undergone sex-change surgery found resolution for their many general psychological problems. Second (and this was more ambitious), I wanted to see whether male infants with ambiguous genitalia who were being surgically transformed into females and raised as girls did, as the theory (again from Hopkins) claimed, settle easily into the sexual identity that was chosen for them. These claims had generated the opinion in psychiatric circles that one’s “sex” and one’s “gender” were distinct matters, sex being genetically and hormonally determined from conception, while gender was culturally shaped by the actions of family and others during childhood.

The first issue was easier and required only that I encourage the ongoing research of a member of the faculty who was an accomplished student of human sexual behavior. The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jon Meyer was already developing a means of following up with adults who received sex-change operations at Hopkins in order to see how much the surgery had helped them. He found that most of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it. But in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition. They had much the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before. The hope that they would emerge now from their emotional difficulties to flourish psychologically had not been fulfilled.

We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it. But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia. (Read more.)

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The Illness of George III

From Madame Gilflurt:

 If all else failed, the patient would be controlled by fear. Dr Willis, who came from his Lincolnshire asylum to attend George, believed this was instrumental to recovery. He first had the King separated from his family and all looking glasses removed. The keepers were instructed to return George’s blows and abuses, like for like. Willis then became a kind of harsh schoolmaster, punishing George if he refused to eat or became unmanageable. The greatest punishment, it seemed, was confinement. They started off by “sheeting” George; swaddling him tightly like an infant of the period to prevent movement. When it became clear mere linen would not do the trick, they progressed to a “strait waistcoat” made of a resilient striped material called “tick”, which was tied up with tapes much in the manner of a modern straightjacket. Clearly, George remained unruly, for Willis introduced a bulky chair with restraints on the arms and legs. Too heavy to be thrown down, the chair would hold George captive for hours. He resentfully called it his “Coronation Chair”. (Read more.)

Tiny-Librarian has portraits of George III, Queen Charlotte, and all of their children, HERE.

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More About Fr. De Smet

From Aleteia:

...Belgian-born Father De Smet had an excellent rapport with American Indians, said the College Fix and others: 

While converting thousands to Catholicism, De Smet also helped negotiate treaties among the Indians and the United States, ensuring their land and safety.
 

Writing at Magnificat, author and professor Anthony Esolen called De Smet "one of the most remarkable missionaries in the history of the Church."

He said that Father De Smet rebuked one tribe for attacking another without justification, and the two tribes "buried the tomahawk" because of him. His reputation grew so much that by 1862, it was a no-brainer for President Lincoln to send him to dissuade the Sioux from attacking white settlers as a way of avenging themselves for stolen land and broken treaties. He was successful.

"Had America followed his lead, great good would have come of it, and many evils — war, the theft of Indian lands, perfidy, mutual hatred, and the moral collapse that awaits a defeated people under patronage — might never have been," Esolen said. 

Also reacting to the news was columnist and former presidential candidate  Patrick Buchanan. "As the mission of this Jesuit university is, presumably, to instruct the Catholic young in their faith and send them out into the world to bring the good news of Jesus Christ as Lord and savior to nonbelievers, what exactly is the problem here?" he wrote. "If the founder of Christianity is the Son of God, then Christianity  is a superior religion."

Father De Smet is not alone in being the subject of controversy because of his relationship to Native Americans. Soon after news broke that Pope Francis intends to come to the United States and canonize Blessed Junipero Serra, the Spanish Franciscan who founded many of California's missions, a congressman initiated a move to replace Serra's statue in Statuary Hall inside the US Capitol in Washington. The congressman took issue with Serra's alleged mistreatment of Native Americans. (Read more.)

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