A Union of the English-Speaking Peoples

"As we stand on the threshold of a new century - indeed, of a new millennium - it behooves us to remember what led to the creation of the English-Speaking Union in the first place.

Evelyn Wrench’s idea to form a society for the co-operation of the English-speaking peoples came amidst the carnage and chaos of the First World War. He was prescient. He believed then - and history has borne him out - that the security of the world would largely depend on the close co-operation of the English speaking peoples. Europe’s first great war had made that much clear; its second, only a little more than two decades later, would confirm it.

It was in the 1930s that Winston Churchill set out to write A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Having served as chairman of the English-Speaking Union from 1921-1926, he knew well the importance of drawing together those who had stood their ground against Germany during the Great War. When he was finally able to return to his task in the 1950s, after the defeat of Hitler’s tyranny, he was more convinced than ever of what he called the English-speaking peoples’ “common duty to the human race.” In his commitment to the English-speaking peoples, as in so much else, Churchill displayed what President Ronald Reagan would later describe as “that special attribute of great statesmen - the gift of vision, the willingness to see the future based on the experience of the past.”

From its official launch on the Fourth of July, 1918, the ESU has prospered and grown into the international organisation we know today, bringing together in common cause over one billion speakers of the English language. Through your programmes and publications, your scholarships and exchanges, the ESU does so much to insure that we will remain united and continue to promote the fundamental principles inherent in our English-speaking cultures. For English is not only the language of politics, diplomacy, and finance, of international business and travel; it is also - and most important of all - the language of values.

The values of the English-speaking peoples which we celebrate are of ancient origin. In the preface to his History, Churchill pointed out that “by the time Christopher Columbus set sail for the American continent” Britain had already come to be characterised by a body of legal principles and institutions including “parliament, trial by jury, local government by local citizens, and even the beginnings of a free press.” These values which we share as English speaking peoples have come together in what we call the rule of law."

_____

1999 Dec 7 Tu, Margaret Thatcher.
Speech to the English-Speaking Union in New York ("The Language of Liberty").

Father Rutler: The Prince of Lies

Father George W. Rutler

The Prince of Lies cannot lie in the presence of Christ: “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Luke 4:34). And Christ who is the Truth knows him, too: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). 

Satan does not want anyone to know him, and yet in the present discontent that afflicts our culture, many anarchists and Marxists invoke him. The desecration of churches and statues of saints is spreading. Twice recently, our own church has been defaced with Satanic symbols: not just the customary obscenities, but invocations of the Prince of Lies. 

The mystics have known two characteristics of Satan. A Desert Father around 300 A.D., Abba Apollo, had a vision of him: “The devil has no knees. He cannot kneel; he cannot adore; he cannot pray; he can only look down his nose in contempt. Being unwilling to bend the knee at the name of Jesus is the essence of evil.” (cf. Isaiah 45:23, Romans 14:11) The other malignant quality of the Liar, as revealed to Saint Martin of Tours, is that he can look as attractive as Christ, but he has no wounds. Instead of taking our suffering upon himself, the Anti-Christ inflicts suffering. That is his infernal nourishment and macabre ecstasy. 

Playing the Devil’s game is dangerous. He has concealed weapons, and the chief of them is deceit. At one recent political convention, a Religious sister from a dying community, in secular dress, prayed not to the Lord, but to “O Divine Spirit” in a way that would have been unobjectionable to a Hindu or an Aztec. With concomitant vagueness, she said that an opinion on the killing of unborn life was above her “pay grade.” At the convention that followed, another Religious in full habit, who is a surgeon and former Army colonel, Sister Deirdre Byrne, made clear that naming the lies of Satan was not above her pay grade as she held her “weapon of choice: the rosary.” 

The rosary is the most effective private prayer in defying the Liar. The greatest public prayer is the Holy Eucharist. Four years ago in France, two Islamic terrorists sliced the throat of 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel at the Altar of Sacrifice. His last words were: “Va-t’en, Satan!” (Be gone, Satan!) Christ had said the same in the wilderness and on the way to his crucifixion (Mark 8:33; Matthew 16:23). 

Unlike some Catholics, who shy away from mentioning the name of Christ at public gatherings lest they give offense, the evangelist Franklin Graham prayed “In the mighty name of your son, my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” Christ himself warned: “Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels” (Luke 9:26). 

Faithfully yours in Christ,
Father George W. Rutler 

 

This is How the President of Poland Receives the Eucharist

Father Rutler: Petulant Jacobins

Father George W. Rutler July waves Old Glory and Le Tricolore. Jacques-Louis David based the French flag on the cockade of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been urged to help the American colonists by the Duke of Gloucester, in a funk because his brother, King George III, disapproved of his marriage. At least there was no Reign of Terror in Philadelphia.    Our unofficial “National Hymn” was written by a professor of English literature from Wellesley College after a trip in 1893 to Pike’s Peak, from whose twilight purple summit she could see grain fields hued in amber. An elderly parishioner of mine was a student of Professor Katharine Lee Bates and remembered her reciting the final 1913 draft of “America the Beautiful.” The melody, “Materna,” had been composed in 1882 by a church organist, Samuel Ward, on a ferry from Coney Island to Newark.    In the “political correctness” and “cancel culture” of recent days, there have been attempts to censor “America the Beautiful” on the grounds that it is unfeeling to make reference to “alabaster cities [that] gleam undimmed by human tears.” En route to Colorado, Bates had visited the World’s Columbian Exposition where crowds were stunned by Nikola Tesla’s incandescent light bulbs. The illuminated “White City” was plaster and not alabaster, but it envisioned a culture enlightened by the Heavenly Jerusalem, just as another lady of letters, Julia Ward Howe, in the Civil War had seen earthly struggle from a divine perspective: “Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel.” No naïf, Professor Bates knew all about the human tears in Chicago slums and had worked with Jane Addams and her Hull House. But souls today, bereft of critical judgment, would decry mention of a “White City” and an exposition honoring Columbus.    There are also demands to eliminate our National Anthem because the author owned slaves. In fact, Francis Scott Key freed his slaves and pleaded before the Supreme Court for the liberation of 300 African slaves captured off the ship “Antelope” along the Florida coast. He also worked with John Quincy Adams in the “Amistad” case to free 53 slaves.    Key’s anthem was based on verses he composed in 1805 to celebrate the victory over the Muslim slave-trading pirates on the Barbary coast: “And pale beam’d the Crescent, its splendor obscured / By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation. …” Although the founder of Islam was a slave trader, the bigoted zeal of contemporary rioters hesitates to menace mosques.    Some of these petulant Jacobins demand to replace our National Anthem with the pretentious doggerel of the song “Imagine” by John Lennon: “Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky.”    That is not quite Francis Scott Key, Julia Ward Howe, or Katharine Lee Bates. When the opioid bubble bursts, heaven and hell remain. Take your choice. Faithfully yours in Christ, Father George W. Rutler

Father Rutler: "Peter Pan" Adolescents

Father George W. Rutler

Stalin, killer of at least 20 million people, said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” In mid-nineteenth-century China, the civil war known as the Taiping Rebellion cost upwards of 30 million lives.

   The feast of Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and his 119 companions, on July 9, is a reminder that the persecution of Christian missionaries and native Chinese, begun in the mid-17th century, continues into our time. Augustine had been a soldier assigned as a prison guard for the French missionary bishop, Louis Gabriel Dufresse, whose martyrdom in Chengdu moved Augustine to request baptism, after which he became a priest and was tortured and killed in 1815. Later, in the Boxer Rebellion, 30,000 Christians would be slaughtered.

   There are magnificent witnesses in China today, among whose champions is Cardinal Zen, indomitable at the age of eighty-eight. The insouciance with which some timorous Western ecclesiastics have cast a blind eye to the persecution of the Catholics in China, will be remembered as a dark blot on the history of our time.

   Mao killed at least 40 million. His “Cultural Revolution,” which executed upwards of 3 million, excited mobs of youths as agents of government repression. Monuments of ancient culture were destroyed. These included nearly 7,000 priceless works of art in the Temple of Confucius alone as part of the frenzied attack on the Four Olds: Old Customs, Old Habits, Old Culture, and Old Ideas.

   In our own country, the debutantish radicalism of hysterical youths whose misguided idealism makes a venomous brew when mixed with poor education, is exploited by more sinister strategists. James Madison described such mobs as: “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

   Young people eager to condemn the immorality of forebears, while exulting in their own undisciplined lives, recently pulled down a statue of Saint Junípero Serra. It evoked the attack on the Franciscan mission in Alta California on November 4, 1775, when 600 native warriors pierced the friar Father Luis Jayme with eighteen arrows as he called to them: “Love God, my children!”

   Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, the one Iraqi combatant to receive the Medal of Honor, has said that our universities are turning out “Peter Pan” adolescents who would profit better if they joined the Army where they would be taught how to be men and women.

   After the destruction of the statue of Saint Junípero Serra, the wise Archbishop of San Francisco did not engage in polemics. He simply went to the site of the vandalism and said the exorcism prayer of Saint Michael. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).

Faithfully yours in Christ,

Father George W. Rutler

Ronald Reagan: One Nation Under God

Father James Altman: Which Road Will You Choose?

Father James Altman is the Pastor of Saint James the Less Church in La Crosse, Wisconsin.