Pat Buchanan: Trolling for War with Russia

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad.

A “judicious use of stand-off and air weapons,” they claim, “would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process.”

In brief, to strengthen the hand of our diplomats and show we mean business, we should start bombing and killing Syrian soldiers.

Yet Syria has not attacked us. And Congress has not declared war on Syria, or authorized an attack. Where do these State hawks think President Obama gets the authority to launch a war on Syria?

The Latest Outrage from the Man Purporting to be Pope

As we recently notified our readers, we have determined that the surest way to safeguard our faith is to disregard anything uttered by the man purporting to be the most recent successor to Saint Peter.  Whether he has a drinking problem, is as one publication has suggested, "entering his dotage," or just an old fashioned anti-Pope, we are not sure.  But we don't need advanced degrees in ecclesiology, theology, or church history to know that this "Pope" is aberrant and in no way in communion with his predecessors, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Church Tradition and teaching.  We pray that God in His mercy will send a conclave and restore to the Chair of Saint Peter a truly Catholic pope.

The following article by Damian Thompson appeared in The Spectator.

Pope Francis says most marriages today are ‘invalid’. This is a disaster for the Catholic Church

By Damian Thompson

Pope Francis, spiritual leader of a billion people, has just informed them that ‘the great majority’ of sacramental marriages are invalid because couples don’t go into them with the right intentions. He was speaking at a press conference in Rome. Here’s the context, from the Catholic News Agency (my emphases):

‘I heard a bishop say some months ago that he met a boy that had finished his university studies, and said “I want to become a priest, but only for 10 years”. It’s the culture of the provisional. And this happens everywhere, also in priestly life, in religious life,’ he said.

‘It’s provisional, and because of this the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null. Because they say “yes, for the rest of my life!” but they don’t know what they are saying. Because they have a different culture. They say it, they have good will, but they don’t know.’

Uh? You can read the full report here but you won’t be much the wiser. The Pope, thinking aloud in the manner of some maverick parish priest after a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, has just told millions of his flock that they are not really married.

Did he mean to say that? What does he really think? What authority do his words carry?

And why should Catholics even have to ask these questions? Francis’s off-the-cuff ramblings on matters of extreme pastoral sensitivity are wreaking havoc in the Catholic Church, as I’ve written here.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times has just tweeted this response:

I suspect that even the Pope’s most liberal admirers will have difficulty extricating him from this mess.

Daniel Hannan: Britain's Song Is Not Yet Sung

Last Priest Survivor of Nazi Prison Camp Dies Aged 102

 

Fr Scheipers, imprisoned in Dachau, was viewed by the Nazis as a 'fanatical proponent of the Catholic Church'

Fr Hermann Scheipers, the last surviving priest who was imprisoned in the notorious Dachau prison camp, has died in his home town of Ochtrup, Germany, at the age of 102.

He was arrested in October 1940 by German authorities because of his staunch Catholicism and taken to Dachau, near Munich, five months later. The camp held a large number of priests.

Fr Scheipers was sympathetic with Polish forced labourers, celebrating Mass with them and hearing their confessions prior to being taken into custody, reported KNA, the German Catholic news agency.

Read more at Catholic Herald >> 

 

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP Speaks on Brexit

Jacob Rees-Mogg explains why the EU is a failed state which is fundamentally undemocratic. He sets out some of the problems it has caused with its Common Agricultural Policy, Common Fisheries Policy, its Euro currency project and the Schengen agreement which removed borders between countries.

Father Rutler: The Enemies of Religion

At a Vigil Service before the burial of a friend who was a Knight of Malta, a comfortable attorney who was a self-styled “progressivist” took umbrage at a phrase I had read from the daily prayer of that Order: “Be it mine to practice and defend the Catholic, the Apostolic, the Roman faith against the enemies of religion. . . .” He said that there are no enemies of religion anymore. When our Lord sent his disciples out, he told them what to expect and disabused them of such dangerous naïveté. They would be lambs among wolves, and not lambs among lambs.
 
In little more than a dozen years, the Christian population in Iraq has dropped from 2 million to 300,000. In Syria, where Christians once were ten percent of the population, there are fewer than a million now, and many of them are being kidnapped and held for ransom at $100,000 each. The misery of enslavement, destruction of churches, crucifixions and beheadings was brought into sharp focus last March when sixteen people were gunned down in a nursing home, including four Indian religious sisters of Blessed Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who were caring for them. That may have been the efficient cause for the U.S. State Department declaring, after long tarrying, that all this is deliberate genocide.
 
In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad wrote: “. . . no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” Artful denial is a common disposition among those who do not want to compromise their ideology with reality, lest they be discomfited by confrontation with evil.
 
The Turkish government persists in denying the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. Japan still denies the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Not until 1994 did Russia accept full responsibility for the slaughter of 21,857 Polish officers, clergy, and academics in the Katyn forest. At the time, President Roosevelt blamed that on the Nazis and exiled to American Samoa the Navy officer, George Earle, who produced the facts.
 
In that same year of 1943, Roosevelt received in the Oval Office the Catholic layman Jan Karski who had heroically microfilmed evidence of the German concentration camps, but the President wanted only to talk about farm horses. Even Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later wrote: “I did not say that (Karski) was lying. I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference.” George Orwell called the obliteration of conscience in the face of malice “doublethink.”  The psychological term is “dissociation.”
 
Our parish is blessed to have as its patron Saint Michael the Archangel, and his “defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil” is not the last resort but the first in the perpetual spiritual combat. That is why on Sundays we invoke him at the end of Mass. 

Trooping the Colour 2016 - Full