Poland’s Incoming Prime Minister: ‘My Dream Is to Re-Christianize the EU’

Hope they will start with the Vatican.

Supreme Court building in Warsaw, Poland. Photographer: NurPhoto/NurP

Poland’s incoming prime minister threw down the gauntlet with the European Union, offering to "help the West with proper values" after his allies advanced a judicial overhaul that the bloc has criticized as democratic backsliding.

Premier-designate Mateusz Morawiecki, tapped to replace Beata Szydlo halfway through the government’s term, rejected threats by EU leaders who have warned that Poland may lose out on the aid that drives its economic growth if it didn’t uphold the rule of law. His comments followed a heated parliamentary debate in which the ruling Law & Justice party approved draft laws to revamp the Supreme Court and overhaul a panel that appoints judges despite warnings from EU officials that the measures may trigger sanctions.

While Morawiecki a western-educated finance minister, has impressed foreign investors as the steward of the EU’s largest eastern economy, he made clear his allegiance is with his conservative party and its vision of returning Poland -- and the rest of Europe -- to its traditional Christian roots. In his first interview since being named prime minister on Friday, he lauded his "great, proud nation" and said it would not submit to "blackmail" from other European leaders.

Read more at Bloomberg >>

The Gesualdo Six - "Es Ist ein Ros' entsprungen" - Praetorius

At Ely Cathedral, the Gesualdo Six sing the beautiful German Advent carol "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen" by Michael Praetorius under the medieval Octagon as part of the #aChristmasMiracle campaign.

Father Rutler: The Right Use of Reason

Fr. George W. Rutler As a chaplain in a state mental hospital, I quickly learned two things. First, sometimes it was easy to mistake a psychiatrist for one of the patients. Second, and more importantly, the mentally ill can be highly intelligent. If one begins with an illogical premise, one may convincingly make a fallacy seem cogent. An unfortunate man in a locked ward who thinks he is Napoleon Bonaparte can almost convince a visitor that he is there because he lost the battle of Waterloo. Insanity is not a lack of brains; it is a lack of judgment. The Second Sunday of Advent focuses on the right use of reason, in preparation for the coming of Christ the Logos, the source of all creation. He is the Righteous Judge because he is supremely logical, and it would be a form of madness not to expect the Logos to be so.  Our society has employed cleverness to justify moral madness, rationalizing a radical overhaul of social order as “hope and change.” George Orwell anticipated this in his “doublethink” which means holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both of them, so that, for instance, ignorance is strength, war is peace, freedom is slavery. Currently there are those who call censored speech “freedom of speech” and redistribution of wealth “income equality,” and who varnish anarchy as “resistance.” Infanticide is responsible parenthood, infidelity is independence, decadence is progress, common sense is bias, and natural law is hate speech. When the modern moral collapse euphemized as “sexual liberation” redefined vice as freedom, defective judgment unleashed a host of contradictions, so that the very institutions that promoted libertinism affect to be scandalized when celebrities are revealed to have done precisely what the euphemizers wanted. LikeCasablanca’s Captain Renault they are “Shocked! Shocked!” “Doublethinkers” cannot cope with the consequences of their manipulation of logic. Immature students riot when a professor disagrees with them, and voters scream at the sky when an election does not go their way. Their intolerance calls itself tolerance, but it is the false kind of tolerance which, as Chesterton said, is the virtue of the man without convictions. The same people who ask “Who am I to judge?” judge right judgment to be tactlessly judgmental, and they politicize the judiciary to appoint justices who will usurp the function of legislators. Certainly, our Lord forbids any attempt to judge the human heart or the fate of a soul (Matthew 7:2), but blurring the line between right and wrong, which the theologians call antinomianism, turns an entire culture into a raucous asylum.  “If I say to the wicked, ‘You shall surely die,’ and you give him no warning, nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way, in order to save his life, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood I will require at your hand” (Ezekiel 3:18).

Theresa May Betrays the British People

‘Pathetic’ – Appeaser Theresa Makes Heavy Concessions on Money, Regulatory Alignment, and the EU Court as Brexit Deal Struck
 

A deal has been struck between the UK and the EU on phase one of the Brexit negotiations, which hinged on the status of EU citizens in the UK, the bloc’s financial claims on Britain, and the border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland.

The EU negotiating team has, after many ups and downs, agreed that Prime Minister Theresa May has made “sufficient progress” on their demands, and will recommend the European Council greenlights progress towards trade talks — but leading Leave supporters to believe too many concessions have been made, with the country exiting the bloc in name only.

Details of the agreement published by the European Commission and comments by members of the May government and EU elite suggest a substantial blurring of Britain’s supposed “red line” on the powers of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/ECJ) in the United Kingdom after Brexit, with environment secretary Michael Gove boasting that the rights of EU citizens will be upheld by British courts, but “of course” they will have regard for EU law when doing so — arguably giving EU citizens in Britain the status of what has been described as a “super-privileged caste”, with superior legal rights to British nationals.

Read more at Breitbart >> 

"Pope" Francis Assisted the Argentine Military Junta

On this day in 1983, thanks to Margaret Thatcher and British armed forces, Argentina's murderous military junta fell.  A key supporter of that criminal regime was none other than Jorge Mario Bergoglio.   "Pope" Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), according to Steve Pieczenik (MD, PhD, former United States Department of State official, psychiatrist) assisted the Argentine Military Junta between 1976-1977 in its crackdown of priests and nuns who tried to counter that regime.  Fancy that – the current Pope – assisted in the arrest, torture and subsequent murder of fellow Catholic priests and nuns.

 

L'Accroche-Chœur - "Veni Veni Emmanuel"

Veni, Veni Emmanuel is a synthesis of the great "O Antiphons" that are used for Vespers during the octave before Christmas (Dec. 17-23). These antiphons are of ancient origin and date back to at least the ninth century.

Father Rutler: The Expectation of Advent

Fr. George W. Rutler 

The explanation for your sense of expectation is that you have an imagination. Unlike animals guided by instinct, we can imagine past and future. Advent is the time of expectation. Since Christ is not limited by time, he can be born again in our lives at every Christmas.
 

Expectation requires thinking about the four most important matters of existence: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. These are the primary mysteries that arrest the attention of minds awake, more compelling than holiday shopping and attempts at partying before Christmas begins.
 

To look at death at the start of Advent is what we do on a small scale when we look at the end of anything, whether it be the end of the day or the end of some project we have been working on, or even the end of a movie or a song. The question is: Does the end of life have a purpose? C.S. Lewis answered that in a typically lucid way: “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
 

Along with the sense of expectation is the intuition that what is expected is more vital than what we now have. On the day after Christmas in 1941, Winston Churchill stood before the joint houses of Congress and spoke of “. . . my life, which is already long, and has not been entirely uneventful.” Then a full twenty-four years later, his dying words were: “I’m bored with it all.” That was really wonderful because, though skeptical about the Gospel, he knew that things as they are, are not enough. He was a bit like Benjamin Franklin who, while far from an orthodox Christian, playfully wrote his own epitaph as a printer, comparing himself to a worn old book: “For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new and more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended, By the Author.”
 

There is a worthy movement now to rebuild the lamented old Pennsylvania Station, constructed on the site of our original church. That church was destroyed in 1963, in the arrogant period when many classical churches were wrecked by misguided liturgical experts who shared the modern contempt for anything old. The restoration of the old station would cost about $3.5 billion, an immense amount but small change compared to the $20 billion of innocuous glass boxes rising around us in the Hudson Yards development.
 

Jesus spoke of rebuilding the Herodian Temple in three days (John 2:19). That was at the price of his own blood, for he was speaking of his body. He did raise it. And he can do the same for us.