Church Militant's Statement on the "Pope" -- With Which We Heartily Agree

A Message from Her Majesty The Queen to the People of Australia following the recent Droughts

Prince Philip and I have been deeply saddened to hear of one of the worst Australian droughts in living memory.

I know Australia as a land where extremes of weather, floods and droughts are taken in their stride, and life goes on with a stoic and determined spirit.

It is clear, however, that the current drought is taking an immense toll, especially on those living and working in rural communities, who are, in so many ways, the very heart and soul of Australia. 

It is heartening and reassuring to see that families, communities and the entire nation are working together and supporting each other at this time of need.

My thoughts and prayers are with the many individuals, families, communities and businesses who have been affected, and I send my sincere thanks to all those who stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their support. 

Elizabeth R.

Reconsidering Rudyard Kipling

Was the author and poet best known for 'The Jungle Book' and 'Kim' truly a racist imperialist?

By John Rossi 
From The American Conservative

 

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling by John Collier, 1891, and the cover of “Kim,” published in 1901. (public domain)

Recently the students at Manchester University in England tore down a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “IF” and replaced it with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” They gave as their reason that Kipling was an imperialist and a racist.

What’s interesting about this latest outburst of political correctness and cultural ignorance is that in a strange way the two poems are similar. Both tell the reader to be strong and fight against defeat and rejection in the idiom of their day, Kipling with his “buck up and play the game” and Angelou with her defiant stand against racism no matter the setbacks. My guess is that Angelou might have liked “IF.”

All this brings to mind something the American literary critic Edmund Wilson once wrote: that nobody reads Kipling anymore. I don’t know if this true—he is no longer in the canon of English studies taught in high school and college where some of his work was anthologized as late as the 1960s—but it’s a shame if it is because the caricature of Kipling as a simple-minded drum beater for the British Empire is superficial and naïve.

Consider the question of Kipling’s attitude towards the British. It was, in fact, complex. He was a great admirer of the independent dominions Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. He saw them as part of the vast Anglosphere, including the United States, which had a unique role to play in the future. He was characteristic of those who believed in the destiny of what Winston Churchill called the “English Speaking Peoples.” Despite a certain ambivalence about Americans, Kipling admired their patriotism and energy. He was particularly fond of Theodore Roosevelt whom he nicknamed “Great Heart.” His wife was American and he lived in the U.S. for years, only to leave in 1899 after a petty legal dispute, never to return. One of Kipling’s most quoted—one could say misquoted—lines of poetry was directed at the United States. “Take up the White man’s Burden” had nothing to do with non-white peoples; it was describing the U.S. as it debated whether to annex the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898.

It’s also worth noting that for someone regarded as a bloody-minded imperialist, Kipling was sensitive to the arrogance of empire. His poem “Recessional,” written amidst the celebration (and glorification) of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, reads less like a nationalist’s raving than a warning to the English people, with the the refrain capturing some of the excesses of the occasion:

Far-called our navies melt away
On dune and headland sinks the fire
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget.

Kipling had mixed feelings about the British Empire in Africa and wrote relatively little about it. His poem about Africa that’s quoted most often, “Fuzzy Wuzzy,” takes a somewhat admiring view of Africans:

‘ers to you Fuzzy Wuzzy,
at your ‘ome in the Sudan,
you’re a poor benighted ‘eathen,
but a first class fighting man.

But Kipling felt his deepest affection for India—the part of the British Empire that he knew best. His poetry, and especially his short stories, set against the background of the golden age of the Raj, constitute some of his best work. Anyone doubting this has only to turn to some of his short stories set in India. “Without Benefit of Clergy,” with its powerful portrait of an English government official genuinely in love with an Indian woman, reveals the depth of Kipling’s admiration for Indian life as well as a grasp of the complexity of human relations we often don’t associate with him. His ghost stories set in India, especially “The Phantom Rickshaw,” also hold up well. The Jungle Book and Kim, perhaps his best novels, are not only set in India but their protagonists are Indian, not English.

Barrack Room Ballads, which appeared in 1892 and established Kipling’s reputation, for years provided some of his most-quoted verse: “Danny Deever,” “Gunga Din,” and “Mandalay,” were enormously popular well into the 20th century, at a time when public recitations were commonplace. George Orwell, an admirer of Kipling’s verse—he called it “good bad poetry”—observed that people tended to translate it from Cockney slang into standard speech. He also noted that at times Kipling transcended verse and produced pure poetry, citing the lines from “Mandalay”:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!

His poetry and short stories about the average British soldier or “ranker” are also powerful, if sentimental and marred by Kipling’s insistence on using English slang. Kipling admired the junior officers and the enlisted rankers as the best the English “race” produced. He used the word race as it was understood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as a national term, not a racial one.

The most productive and important part of Kipling’s career lasted for about 25 years and was over by the outbreak of World War I. The death of his beloved son, Jack, at the Battle of Loos in 1915 gradually soured Kipling on life. The new generation of writers in the 1920s and 1930s found him irrelevant and terribly dated. Interestingly, T.S. Eliot retained a certain fondness for him while noting that his tragedy was not that his work was denounced but that it was “merely not discussed.”

Despite a sharp drift to the political right after the war, Kipling managed to keep his balance. Although he shared the typical anti-Semitism of most upper- and middle-class Englishmen of his time, when some of his friends began circulating copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion right after the war, Kipling would have nothing to do with them and declared the publication a “fake.”

With his traditional distrust of Germany as an enemy of England, the rise of Hitler in the early 1930s disturbed Kipling. In 1932, he composed a poem, “The Storm Cone,” whose obvious target was Nazism, which it described as a “midnight” that is about to engulf Europe: “this is the tempest long foretold.”

Given the temper of the times, Kipling will remain anathema: his opinions and views are regarded as retrograde and odious to modern tastes. I note, however, that Netflix is set to debut a darker version of The Jungle Book, starring a cast of Hollywood luminaries, from Christian Bale to Cate Blanchett, in 2019. So maybe there is hope after all.

John Rossi is Professor Emeritus of History at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

Nun Dazzles with Best First-Pitch Ever

Anyone interested in cleaning up the Church should consider putting nuns in charge.  We've known so many extraordinary, accomplished, no-nonsense nuns.  Here's a classic!

Going Home - A Tribute to the American Civil War Veterans

"I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me.  I know too well my weaknesses, that our only hope is in God."

~ Robert E. Lee

I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God. Robert E. Lee
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_e_lee_390330

I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_e_lee_39033

I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_e_lee_390330

Friar Alessandro - Panis Angelicus

"Our Lord awaits us in the Eucharist. Let our praise and glory to the Blessed Sacrament never cease." - Saint Pope John Paul II

We Told You About Cardinal McCarrick 10 Years Ago

We have been fascinated and vindicated in recent weeks to see one of the most sordid stories in the history of the Catholic Church in America finally brought into the cleansing light of day, and we pray, some justice and reparation done regarding the thoroughly corrupt priesthood of Theodore J. McCarrick.  We also take some satisfaction in having revealed the McCarrick crimes more than ten years ago.

Your editor received much of his adult faith formation in the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, a place of orthodoxy, holiness, growth and zeal.  When I moved to the Archdiocese of Newark in 1994, it was very much like stepping into another world -- a place where cultural Catholicism lingered, but real, living faith was cold and dead.  Instead of parishes sponsoring vibrant faith formation programs for all age levels, perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, magnificent, reverent liturgies faithful to Church tradition and the Roman Missal, only "bare, ruined choirs" were to be found in Newark.   If there was any organized parish activity, it was most likely a parish chartered bus trip to Atlantic City for a day of gambling.  A few, mostly Polish parishes were and are the exceptions to the Newark wasteland.

During my ten years in New Jersey I heard all the recently revealed, salacious stories about McCarrick and his abuse of youths, seminarians and priests under his charge.  In 2009, I wrote:

Here at Sunlit Uplands we love our Holy Father and respect most of our bishops; but as we have noted before, there are a few wolves in the sheepfold.

In our view, there is none more corrupt, evil, and destructive than the former Archbishop of Washington, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick. When he was Archbishop of Newark we experienced first-hand the ways in which this dark soul destroys what is orthodox and good, while promoting a dissident, heterodox vision of the Church, fashionable in the 1970's. This notorious deceiver and corrupter of young seminarians, who was caught lying to all of his brother bishops, never misses a media opportunity to sow falsehood and division.

We also published this detailed revelation of McCarrick's scandalous and sinful behavior in April 2008:  Church Critic "Outs" Cardinal McCarrick.   In that article, published 10 years ago, all the misbehavior with seminarians and young priests, which has resulted in "Uncle Ted" being stripped of the rank of Cardinal was revealed.

It gives no pleasure to have been right about this despicable creature, particularly when one considers all of the unfulfilled vocations resulting from the scandal, the many tepid souls who have turned away from the Church, the many souls who have been wounded in mind and spirit by the evil, and the closure of schools and parishes because millions have been repulsed by wolves masquerading as churchmen.

Saint Augustine wrote that "God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”   We pray that upon these ashes a humbled, but truly holy Church, the Body of Christ, led by true servants of the servants of God, may arise, bring light to the world, and renew the face of the earth.