Friday, March 15, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘Cousin Payne’s Wedding’

 

There you stand Payne Murphy,

Beneath the thick bough of an ancient oak,

With Allyson, the answer

To your heart’s yearning,

Glowing beautifully in the late evening sun,

As a bride shall do.

But in that holy moment,

The two of you before the minister,

Your own Uncle Boyd,

Transformed in a mystery

From an individual man and woman

Into husband and wife –

One flesh – in Jesus Christ,

There around you also stand

The souls of Percy Murphy,

Raiford, James, many forebears

Of our family, looking with hope and joy

Upon their offspring,

Now growing to maturity.

The future rests upon your shoulders,

And upon all the youthful generation –

The future of our family, the future of the Church,

The future of the Southern people.

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/cousin-paynes-wedding.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘We’re Running out of “Next Times”’

 

The typical response in the US to disappointing election results is some variant of ‘There’s always next time.’  Yet some trends are turning that into a deceptive hope.

First is the continued ability of a minority of blue urban counties to dominate State-wide elections.

In Kentucky, Gov. Beshear was re-elected with about 52% of the total votes but with only about 23% of the total counties (winning 28 out of 120).

In Ohio, Issue 1, adding pro-abortion language to the Ohio constitution, won with about 57% of the total votes but with only about 28% of the total counties (25 out of 88).  Issue 2, legalizing marijuana, also won with 57% of the total votes but again without even a majority of the counties assenting (45% - 40 out of 88 approved).

Until States give the rural red counties/parishes a greater share of political power, the black widows’ nests that big cities have become will continue to cast their long, poisonous shadow over State-wide elections.  The easiest solution is to tie State-wide elections to total counties won instead of total raw votes received:  A candidate, constitutional amendment, etc., would only be valid if passed in a majority or supermajority of counties.

The second trend is the increasing liberalism of voters regarding social/cultural issues like drugs and abortion.  A large part of the problem is the concept of rights.  Issue 1 contains language such as this:


A. Every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on:

1. contraception;

2. fertility treatment;

3. continuing one’s own pregnancy;

4. miscarriage care; and

5. abortion.

This language of rights is one of the moral conundrums the US must confront.  It really cannot be gainsaid that we have deified the individual human will here in the States.  There are still a good many churches around, but when pastors, priests, bishops, etc., start making demands of their parishioners that impose even the slightest bit on a man’s or woman’s freedom, the latter hit the road in search of a church that affirms them in whatever habits or beliefs that they don’t wish part with, or they simply stop going altogether.  In doing so, we have in large part exchanged the petition to the Heavenly Father ‘Thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer for the satanist Aleister Crowley’s dictum ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’

The Crowleyan worship of our own individual wills necessarily ramifies, because of the absence of the constraints of Christianity, into things like abortion, recreational drug use, changing one’s gender, redefining marriage, and so on.

If there is to be any major change in the current trajectory of society, we will have to broaden our focus from the self-centered will of the individual to include the essential and unchangeable traditions of our Christian forefathers.  Regarding abortion in particular, there is a long line of saints, church canons, etc., that mark any abortion as wrong:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2023/11/garlington-were-running-out-of-next-times/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Friday, March 8, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘Do Patron Saints Still Matter?’

 

Patron saints are not very popular in the West today.  An athlete, a powerful, charismatic politician, a social media influencer – those are the kinds of people likely to get the attention of the average Westerner.

It is not like that everywhere in Christendom, however.  Some countries have escaped the heavier ravages of secularism.  Romania, in eastern Europe, is one of them, and therefore retains a vibrant love for their various patron saints.  The feast day of St. Demetrius the New, the Patron Saint of Bucharest, drew tens of thousands this year:

 

More than 40 Romanian hierarchs from throughout the country and the Romanian Church’s diaspora dioceses came together to celebrate Bucharest’s patron saint last week.

 

They were joined by Metropolitan Panteleimon of Veria of the Greek Orthodox Church and Metropolitan Naum of Ruse of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church for the feast of St. Demetrius the New on October 26-27.

 

Every year, a week-long pilgrimage is held in honor of the saint, with processions and festive hierarchical celebrations. Met. Panteleimon brought relics of St. Demetrios the Myrrh-Gusher and the Panagia Sumela Icon from Greece for the pilgrimage this year.

 

More than 60,000 people had come to venerate the relics of St. Demetrius as of his feast day on Friday, though more came to venerate by the time the pilgrimage ended on Sunday.

The Western countries miss out on a lot by rejecting patron saints.  One thing may be seen quite readily in the report from Bucharest:  unity.  Sixty thousand people gathered together into one place to honor this holy man.  Is it likely that they agree on everything under the sun?  Not at all.  And yet through their desire to honor this saint, this friend of God, they are able to transcend their differences and assemble peaceably as friends.

Second, Western peoples are unable to receive the comfort and healing that patron saints give to their cities and countries.  St. Paraskeva of Iasi, Romania, is a wonderful example in this regard.  Her feast day gathers even more pilgrims than St. Demetrius, running into the hundreds of thousands.  And it is because she is so compassionate towards those who seek her help (as are all saints) that they resort to her in such large numbers:

 . . .

The rest is here:

https://thehayride.com/2023/11/garlington-do-patron-saints-still-matter/

And also here:

https://identitydixie.com/2023/11/10/do-patron-saints-still-matter/

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘Lee in Agony’

 

Lee’s tormentors

Lack none of the demonic rage

Of past persecutors –

Dismembering him and his steed

Piece by piece, as they also

Cut Christ’s martyrs apart

One joint at a time;

Heating the furnace

To infernal degree

Like Nebuchadnezzar’s

Disgraceful men

For the Three Holy Youths.

Defying their hatred,

His face glowed in the fire

With sad nobility –

Foolish souls!  You have confounded yourselves,

Making manifest what had been hidden:

The greater glory of Lee!

Remember ye the tale of Moses,

How his face glowed with Uncreated Light

After conversing face-to-Face with God?

You have revealed the state

Of Lee in Heaven,

Whose Christ-like suffering

For the Southern people,

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.dissidentmama.net/lee-in-agony/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Friday, March 1, 2024

Offsite Post: ‘America Isn’t Dying: It’s Already Dead’

 

Evangelical Protestants are mighty pleased over the ascension of Rep. Mike Johnson to the Speaker’s chair in the US House.  A taste:

 

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a conservative Christian activist, took to X to express his support for Johnson's election. “Mike has been a friend for a long time, and I believe God has answered our prayers with his election,” Perkins tweeted shortly after Johnson was elected House speaker. “Mike will be the America First Speaker we need and will lead with spiritual insight and political courage. Join me in giving thanks to God and covering our new Speaker in prayer.”

But MAGA Mike won’t be able to ‘save America’ from his new perch in Congress.  For the America they are trying to save was doomed from the beginning.  Any people that places the freedom of the individual as the cornerstone of their societal foundation is doomed to failure, as the centrifugal forces such a principle unleashes tear apart all meaningful ties between people and generations.

Indeed, most of US history is nothing more than the continued attempts to keep the inevitable splintering from occurring – the unlawful writing of a new constitution in 1787, the violent suppression of Shay’s Rebellion, the Sedition Act of 1798, the several compromises over slavery, Lincoln’s illegal invasion of the South, the immoral actions involved in the Radical Reconstruction of the South, the federal government’s waging ‘wars of righteousness’ against other countries (beginning with the Spanish-American War and continuing right up to today with the Ukraine war), the murder of dissenting factions (Waco, Ruby Ridge), the imprisonment of political protestors (January 6th), the censorship of narratives the Establishment doesn’t like (covid, climate change, etc.), corporations and governments forcing folks to accept wokeness, etc., etc.

The MAGA Protestants believe that a renewed fidelity to constitutional principles, especially what they call religious liberty or freedom of conscience, will solve all ills.  But it won’t:

 

Despite the manifest illiberalism of the dissenters, the old Tories intuited that subordinating religion to private conviction after the dissenter fashion, and thereby relegating it from the public form of the state to the subjective sentiments of the private conscience, would lead to the kind of relativism which would fragment society into a crowd of atomic strangers, as we have witnessed under the global regime of liberalism. This is a point that was well argued by St. John Henry Newman in his “Biglietto Speech,” delivered in 1879 on becoming a cardinal of the Catholic Church, wherein he offered an apologia for the English conception of establishmentarian Christianity, and condemned the Protestant dissenter tradition as the true enemy of Christendom. Liberalism and revolution in religion, Newman argued, was inherently bound up with liberalism and revolution in politics. 

Some Roman Catholics offer better insights than the MAGA Protestants:

 

 . . . These duties towards God oblige, towards the divine Majesty, not only each one of the citizens but also the civil authority, which, in its public acts, incarnates civil society. God is indeed the author of civil society and the source of all the goods which flow down through it to its members. Civil society must therefore honor and serve God. As for the manner of serving God, this can be no other, in the present economy, than that which He Himself has determined, as obligatory, in the true Church of Christ; and this not only in the person of the citizens, but equally in that of the Authorities who represent civil society [From Vatican II—W.G.].

 

 . . . The problem is not that we have an elite oligarchy imposing its will on the majority; the problem is that human will itself has been established and institutionalized as the ultimate authority, both individually and politically. It is this classical liberalism, now logically morphed into global totalitarianism—for both are grounded in nothing but the human will detached from any publicly recognized, transcendent moral and spiritual authority—that has invited the demons that now rule us through their human proxies.

 

We will never be able to exorcise these demons by attempting to replace them with ‘medical freedom,’ ‘individual sovereignty,’ or ‘the will of the people.’ These are counterfeit replacements for a freedom based upon the truth about human persons with immortal souls teleologically ordered to the natural and supernatural good, the sovereignty of the family, the Church, and all the natural communities that organically and corporately embody the common good and the will of God as known through the Logos, the Tao, the Natural Law. Now, I am a proponent of the natural, God-given freedoms and rights that legitimately authorize the use of political, coercive power to secure and protect them. But these freedoms and rights, properly understood as being grounded in natural and supernatural reality and interpreted definitively and authoritatively only by the Catholic Church, are not the same as the ‘American freedoms’ granted to us, ostensibly, by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. 

 

Though rhetorically our rights come from ‘Nature and Nature’s God,’ there is no actual, historical religious tradition or institution to give determinate meaning and theological authority to such a claim, only unreal, ahistorical, abstract counterfeit of the actual tradition of Catholic Church. As D.C. Schindler has demonstrated, the “god” of the Declaration is not the Christian one, but an Enlightenment, deist, rationalist (and I would add, Freemasonic) substitute for the actual God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of Jesus Christ. Thus, it has only as much authority as it has rhetorical and political power. It was quite easy for later generations of rulers to completely ignore and even reject this artificial civil theology when it was no longer persuasive, and to replace it with progressivism, secularism, and now Wokeism. Because there was no universally recognized transcendent moral and spiritual authority in the American Founding other than the Constitution and “We the People” (which meant, in practice, the will of those empowered to represent the people—when we actually still had representative government—and now the will of psychopathic and Luciferian elites at war with the entire human race), American power, both domestically and abroad, is authorized by nothing but itself.

But the Roman Catholic system is no less susceptible to the evils of individualism than Protestantism (who inherited that mindset precisely from Roman Catholicism), as the Papacy itself is nothing more than the rebellion of an individual bishop against the Orthodox Church the Lord Jesus Himself established upon the faith of His Holy Apostles.  This leads to some truly astounding distortions in Church life:

 . . .

The rest is at https://orthodoxreflections.com/america-isnt-dying-its-already-dead/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!