A Peek Inside Château de Digoine

From The New York Times:

Jean-Louis Remilleux, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who is a member of the committee that oversees La Biennale Paris, is among the most passionate and experienced collectors of items from France’s ancien régime. Mr. Remilleux, 58, has a pied-à-terre in Paris, but his primary residence is the 15-bedroom Château de Digoine, on a 250-acre estate near the city of Beaune, in Burgundy. Parts of it date from the turn of the 18th century, and Architectural Digest has chronicled its contents, which include an array of antiques with a focus on works from the 16th through the 18th centuries. There is also a room dedicated to Marie Antoinette. (Read more.)

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Camille Paglia on Gender Dysfunction

 From LifeSite:

Paglia says her feminism is the result of her "childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s." She said that universities and the mainstream media are the new centers of conformism that are "patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police." Paglia said in the video that she is concerned by the "popularity" and "availability" of sex reassignment surgeries.

"Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse," she said. These include "hormones to slow puberty" and "actual surgical manipulations" of children and teenagers.

"I think that this is wrong," she said. "People should wait until they're of an informed age of consent. Parents should not be doing this to their children. And I think that even in the teenage years it's too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt."

Paglia said she suffered "gender dysfunction" as a child, dressing in men's clothing "as often as I could."

"But I still believe that there are fundamentally two sexes that are biologically determined," said Paglia. She wrote her dissertation on androgyny.

Reproductive biology is clear that there are only two sexes, Paglia said, and only a "very small," "minute" number of people are born with genetic abnormalities that make their "gender...ambiguous." It seems she is referring to hermaphrodites. 

On another occasion, she called the subjection of children to puberty blockers "a criminal violation of human rights." (Read more.)

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Fr Tom Uzhunnalil is Free!

From The Catholic Herald:

Kidnapped Indian priest Fr Tom Uzhunnalil has been freed from captivity and flown to Oman, the country’s government has said. Fr Tom was kidnapped when his care home in the Yemeni city of Aden was attacked in March 2016. Four gunmen posing as relatives of one of the residents killed four Indian nuns, two Yemeni staff members, eight elderly residents and a security guard. In May this year, a video was posted online showing the priest in poor health, calling for help. (Read more.)

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A New Project

 Announcing the opening of my Etsy shop, Trianon Bouquet, where I will be selling homemade, all natural face creams. Both the night treatment Midnight Bouquet and the day treatment Morning Bouquet are offered. The beauty creams were created for women over thirty-five. The restorative formula is designed to help diminish signs of aging, as well as revive the skin's suppleness and softness, with regular use. The essential oils of orange blossom, rosemary, lavender and rose are reminiscent of the gardens of Trianon. Midnight Bouquet may also be used as skin therapy for dry elbows, knees, and feet, and as a hair masque to repair split ends. Trianon Bouquet Beauty Creams are inspired by Queen Marie-Antoinette, who loved her gardens at Petit Trianon, and was known to have beauty products made from her own herbs and flowers.

After traveling to the Far East, I fell in love with coconut oil, a time-proven beauty product of women in South East Asia. I decided to combine it with olive oil and other oils traditionally used in the West, to make an effective facial treatment for busy, stressed-out modern women. In the meantime, I was inspired to use the herbal and floral fragrances that Marie-Antoinette would have had in her gardens. I remembered how the Queen was fascinated by other cultures, and so would have appreciated the exotic touch of coconut oil as well as the wonders of African shea butter.

Please visit my shop HERE.

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Giving Up on Matrimony

From The New York Post:

The share of Americans ages 25-34 who are married dropped 13 percentage points from 2000 to 2014. A new book by sociologist Mark Regnerus blames this declining rate on how easy it is for men to get off. Regnerus calls it “cheap sex,” an economic term meant to describe sex that has very little cost in terms of time or emotional investment, giving it little value. Regnerus bases his ideas, in part, on the work of British social theorist Anthony Giddens, who argued that the pill isolated sex from marriage and children. Add online pornography and dating sites to the mix and you don’t even need relationships. (Read more.)

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The Problem with Politically Correct History

Historical persons do not always fit neatly into our preconceived categories. From Town Hall:

Even a Confederate general can change. Confederate Gen. William Mahone, one of General Robert E. Lee's most able commanders, owned slaves before the Civil War. But after the war, he led an interracial political movement. He organized and became the leader of the Readjuster Party, the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. In 1881, Mahone was elected to the U.S. Senate, at the time split 37-37 between Republicans and Democrats. But Mahone aligned with the Republicans, the party founded two decades earlier by Northerners trying to stop the expansion of slavery. From 1879 through 1883, Mahone's Readjuster Party dominated Virginia, with a governor in the statehouse, two Readjusters in the U.S. Senate and Readjusters representing six of the state's 10 congressional districts. Under Mahone's leadership, his coalition also controlled the state legislature, the courts and many of the state's coveted federal offices. (Read more.)

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Montreal and Quebec City: A Tale of Two Cities

From Victoria:

Both Montreal and Quebec City remain, at their core, the towns French settlers built almost four hundred years ago, with plenty of joie de vivre. Autumn is the perfect time to explore the long history and exciting contemporary flair of these cities. Strolling the narrow streets of Vieux-Montréal, Montreal’s Old City, on an early autumn evening, it’s easy to think you’ve dropped out of time and place. Surely this is a long-ago evening in France, with cobbled streets and stone buildings rambling on either side. A visitor stops to read the menu outside a little auberge, while another practices lèche-vitrines (window-shopping) as she stands at the patisserie, transfixed by what a talented baker has done with butter and chocolate. Two children ride by on bicycles, giggling with one another, and in the distance, the smell of fresh, crusty bread fills the air. With a weekend ahead to sample the pleasures of the city, simply walking can be its own reward; there’s a discovery to be made everywhere you look. In the fall, the trees seem to pour rivers of scarlet and gold over the hills. The blaze of bold color is in sharp contrast to the St. Lawrence River’s pewter water and the gray of the old stone buildings. The air is mild but has just enough of a chill to make the homey inns and restaurants even cozier. (Read more.)

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Hiring American

The ups and downs. From Politico:

The Beachmere Inn in Ogunquit, a seaside village in southeastern Maine, didn’t receive the eight H-2B visas it requested to supplement its summer housekeeping staff. To make ends meet, owner Sarah Diment recruited college kids through her Facebook network and cobbled together part-time shifts, some filled by American students and some by foreign students here on cultural exchange visas. In the past year, Diment estimates she had to boost housekeeping wages roughly 10 percent to keep employees. Diment could continue to increase wages, but the higher staffing costs, she says, would make it difficult to keep the business open year-round. “Raising wages is good in theory, until you put it into practice,” she said.

North American Midway Entertainment, a large traveling-amusement-park company headquartered in Indiana, requested roughly 400 H-2B workers this year, a quarter of its total seasonal workforce. But the Department of Homeland Security reached its 66,000-visa cap before the company could secure the guest workers. Company President Danny Huston said he had to skip three fairs and contract out some ride operations because of the visa shortage. In total, he estimates that North American Midway may have lost as much as $800,000. But the company was able to cover about one-third of the vacancies by hiring American through job fairs, newspaper advertisements, and social media. "We even set up a job fair in Puerto Rico," Huston said.

Other employers say hiring American just isn't an option. Michael Martin owns a Maryland-based landscaping company. Roughly 40 percent of his workers — and the majority of those performing manual labor — hold H-2B visas, he told POLITICO. Martin received his H-2B workers on time this year, but he knows other landscapers who didn't, and lost clients as a result. "It affects people, their bottom line," he said, "whether they’re still in business, whether they’re going to make it next year."
(Read more.)

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The Orans Posture

From Catholic365:

A discussion that is common in Catholic parishes between the more orthodox members of the parish and the more “progressive” members is whether or not the faithful should use the Orans Posture during the Our Father. When such a question comes up, the obvious solution is to go to the rubrics. Unfortunately, in this case, the General Instruction on the Roman Missal (GIRM) is relatively silent on the topic. Because of the GIRM’s silence, many people have taken this to mean that the faithful may do whatever they want. However, this is not the case. In the document, Instruction On Certain Questions Regarding the Collaboration of the Non-Ordained Faithful in the Sacred Ministry of Priests, put out by the Vatican on August 15, 1997, we read,

"In eucharistic celebrations deacons and non-ordained members of the faithful may not pronounce prayers — e.g. especially the eucharistic prayer, with its concluding doxology — or any other parts of the liturgy reserved to the celebrant priest. Neither may deacons or non-ordained members of the faithful use gestures or actions which are proper to the same priest celebrant. It is a grave abuse for any member of the non-ordained faithful to "quasi preside" at the Mass while leaving only that minimal participation to the priest which is necessary to secure validity" (ICP Practical Provisions 6 §2).

What the above statement means is that we may not say the Eucharistic prayers along with the priest — believe it or not, I see people mouthing the words along with the priest every week. More importantly to this topic, this also means the faithful may not use the same gestures that are reserved for the priest celebrant.

As mentioned above, the GIRM is silent with regard to the posture of the faithful during the Our Father, however, the Sacramentary (the book of prayers for Mass used by the priest) states that the celebrant is to pray the Our Father with hands extended. Looking back at ICP, the faithful are NOT to use gestures or actions proper to the priest celebrant. Using this argument, one would think that the rubrics could be used to appeal to the faithful. Unfortunately, many of the faithful view the rubrics as another set of rules and those of us who wish to enforce the rubrics are no better than the Pharisees. (Read more.)

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