‘The Sad but Hopeful Tale of a Reformed Irishman’

By Thomas Riley

In mourning for the Ireland that is dead,
I’m wearing black on this, the Feast of Pat.
The saint himself, I think, is doing that
Up in celestial regions.  Now, instead
Of holy poverty and Scriptures read,
The isle St. Paddy freed grows soft and fat
On babies’ blood.  A snake would smell a rat
In such a hellhole, worthy to be fled.
Ireland, I now confess, ain’t everywhere.
Let truer countries rise to seize the day
And cure me of Hibernian despair!
The Global South hath yet a role to play,
And there is promise on the Eastern air.
(God bless you, Mother Russia, by the way!)

***

For an account of the life of the Holy Apostle to the Irish Saint Patrick:

https://orthochristian.com/120199.html

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘Saint Michael and the South’

‘ . . . according to God’s revelation in the Bible, not only do human beings have their own guardian angel but nations have them, too.

‘ . . . Not only does every nation have them, but also every city, every town, every locale, and particularly every temple devoted to the worship of God.’—Father Maximos (Quoted in Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of Silence, Image, New York, 2001, p. 109)

Do you want heart-warming news, fellow Southrons?  Well, there it is, in those quotation marks:  Not only does the South have her own guardian angel, but Dixie is well-nigh full of them – an angel for the whole of us, an angel for each State, an angel for each county, parish, town, hamlet, forest, river, creek, and field.

For faithful Southerners seeking victory over the fallen passions, seeking healing of soul and body, and freedom from foes seen and unseen, this is encouraging to know.  For God has bidden the angels to help us in all these things.

The Holy Apostle Paul, his disciple St Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy men and women reveal the mysteries of the angelic realm to us – the nine ranks of angels, their appointed duties, etc.  For example:

 

The THRONES (Col 1:16) stand after the Cherubim, mysteriously and incomprehensibly bearing God through the grace given them for their service. They are ministers of God’s justice, giving to tribunals, kings, etc. the capacity for righteous judgment.

 

 . . .

 

DOMINIONS (Col 1:16) hold dominion over the angels subject to them. They instruct the earthly authorities, established by God, to rule wisely, and to govern their lands well. The Dominions teach us to subdue sinful impulses, to subject the flesh to the spirit, to master our will, and to conquer temptation.

 

 . . .

 

PRINCIPALITIES (Col 1:16) have command over the lower angels, instructing them in the fulfilling of God’s commands. They watch over the world and protect lands, nations and peoples. Principalities instruct people to render proper honor to those in authority, as befits their station. They teach those in authority to use their position, not for personal glory and gain, but to honor God, and to spread word of Him, for the benefit of those under them.

Of particular interest to the South in these times when the enemies of God have become quite strong is the Archangel Michael:

 

Over all the Nine Ranks, the Lord appointed the Holy Archangel Michael (his name in Hebrew means “who is like unto God”), the faithful servitor of God, as Chief Commander. He cast down from Heaven the arrogantly proud Lucifer and the other fallen spirits when they rebelled against God. Michael summoned the ranks of angels and cried out, “Let us attend! Let us stand aright before our Creator and do not consider doing what is displeasing unto God!”

 

According to Church Tradition, and in the church services to the Archangel Michael, he participated in many other Old Testament events.

And in the New Dispensation of the Risen Lord Jesus, there are events like this:

 

From ancient times the Archangel Michael was famed for his miracles in Rus. In the Volokolamsk Paterikon is a narrative of Saint Paphnutius of Borov with an account of Tatar tax-gatherers concerning the miraculous saving of Novgorod the Great: “Therefore Great Novgorod was never taken by the Hagarenes... when... for our sins the godless Hagarene emperor Batu devoured and set the Russian land aflame and came to Novgorod, and God and the Most Holy Theotokos shielded it with an appearance of Michael the Archangel, who forbade him to enter into it. He [Batu] was come to the Lithuanian city and came toward Kiev and saw the stone church, over the doors of which the great Archangel Michael had written and spoken to the prince his allotted fate, ‘By this we have forbidden you entry into Great Novgorod’.”

It is altogether a very natural and fitting thing, then, for Dixie to ask St Michael to come to our aid:  ‘We invoke Saint Michael for protection from invasion by enemies and from civil war, and for the defeat of adversaries on the field of battle. He conquers all spiritual enemies.’

This is the key, though – We must ask.  . . .

The rest may be read here

https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/saint-michael-and-the-south

And also here:

https://southernorthodox.org/saint-michael-the-south/

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘Covens and Convents’

 

What a gloomy garden grows

In New England ground,

Yankees trudging

Haltingly along,

Cultivated

By a curious cast

Of women – Anne Hutchinson

The headstrong heretic;

Ann Lee, the Shaker queen;

Beth Stanton, suffragette;

Mary Baker Eddy,

Modern Gnostic.

 

The Son, shaded

By their wild demeanor,

Can only bring forth

A yield of souls

Stunted and deformed.

 

Darkness!  Darkness!

Witches and the devil

Prowling round the land!

 

Waken!  Waken!

The memory

Of Mother Ethelburga,

Barking’s first abbess

At your ancient home

In Essex county.

 

What a host of saints

And wonders sprouted there –

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.newenglishreview.org/articles/covens-and-convents/.

A brief look at the life of St Ethelburga:

https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/10/saint-ethelburga-of-barking-686.html

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘Alberta Has Given the States an Early Christmas Present’

 

Some folks in the US might be tempted from time to time to reword the Apostle Nathanael’s question (St. John’s Gospel 1:46) and ask, ‘Can anything good come out of Canada?’

That would be a tad presumptuous, based, if nothing else, only on the following.  The Province of Alberta has a new premier (similar to the governors of our States), Danielle Smith, and she is doing excellent work there.  First, she rooted out the globalist World Economic Forum from Alberta’s health care system.  Now she is using the powers of the provincial government to shield Alberta’s people from the harmful policies of the tyrannical Prime Minister Trudeau and the rest of the federal government in Ottawa.

Bill 1, ‘Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act,’ is well on its way to becoming law in Alberta.  Here is a little of its backstory:

 

The now-passed Sovereignty Act intends to prevent “unconstitutional” federal government overreach into matters of provincial jurisdiction, including but not limited to “firearms, energy, natural resources and COVID healthcare decisions.”

 

Smith had introduced the legislation, formally named Bill 1: Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, just nine days before its passing.

 

The bill will most notably help the province push back against federally-imposed rules that impact the region’s oil and gas sector, a major backbone of the western Canadian economy.

 

At the time of its introduction, the government explained that the act “will be used to push back on federal legislation and policy that is unconstitutional or harmful to our province, our people and our economic prosperity,” with Smith herself explaining that there is a “long and painful history of mistreatment and constitutional overreach from Ottawa has for decades caused tremendous frustration for Albertans.”

The Preamble of the Act is worth quoting in full:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2022/12/garlington-alberta-has-given-the-states-an-early-christmas-present/.

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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!

Offsite Post: ‘The Present Union Has Outlived Its Usefulness’

 

Blackstone and Montesquieu give us helpful general definitions of ‘law’.  Blackstone in his Commentaries says it is a rule given by a superior that an inferior must obey; Montesquieu, the necessary relation of one thing to another due to their unchanging natures (opening chapter of The Spirit of the Laws).  With the passage of the falsely-named Respect for Marriage Act by the US Congress (with lots of Republican support), both definitions are trampled upon.

This terrible Act will require the States to honor all marriages contracted in all other States, including those between couples other than the traditional male/female kind.  As marriage can exist only between one man and one woman, Montesquieu’s definition is broken – a man ‘marrying’ a man and so on represents a falsehood and therefore cannot be lawful.  And as marriage of one man with one woman was given by a superior (God – see Genesis 2:24, St. Matthew’s Gospel 19:4-6) to an inferior (mankind), the redefinition of marriage in the Act to include other arrangements breaks Blackstone’s definition.  Thus, according to the most basic definitions of law, the Respect for Marriage Act has nullified itself and should be obeyed by no one.

Human sexuality is really not a thing for the States to be careless with.  Fr. Joseph Gleason, an Orthodox priest in Illinois who fled the US with his family during the Marxist Obama years for saner ground, recounts some essential history for us about the fate of societies that embraced sexual debauchery, including this:

#2 — Canaan

Why were the Canaanites destroyed? They had sinned in many ways, for many years. But what particular sins finally brought judgment down upon them? Why did God finally send Israel with instructions to wipe out all of the inhabitants of Canaan?

"You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion. ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. For the land is defiled; therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants." (Leviticus 18:22-25)

Many people know that God sent Israel to destroy the Canaanites, and to take over their land. Few people realize that homosexual sex was one of the reasons why this judgment took place.

Fr. Joseph concludes,

In many biblical cases, God was patient with people even in the midst of many sins. But when they finally descended into the debauchery of sodomy, God's patience wore thin. Judgment was knocking at the door.

These Scriptures have been handed down to us from God's prophets. And they suggest that sodomy is not just your average run-of-the-mill sin. In many cases, sodomites brought down destruction on entire cities, and even upon entire nations.

We need to keep these lessons in mind when we consider what America has legalized and celebrated on a national level, mandating homosexual "marriage" rights in the Supreme Court, and lighting up the White House itself with a profane homosexual-pride rainbow. In the seven years since this took place, the homosexual movement has continued to advance, corrupting the culture and government at every turn.

Sodomites have taken the very sign of peace which God gave Noah, and they have twisted it into a symbol for sodomy.

Is this a level of blasphemy which God will choose to overlook?

But despite these warnings, many in the States are re-embracing the old pre-Christian deities, like Ishtar, whether knowingly or unknowingly.  Rod Dreher writes,

The second -- and most interesting -- god in Cahn's book is Ishtar (Astarte/Ashtoreth/Venus/Inanna), the Babylonian goddess of love, pictured above. She was the goddess of sacred prostitution, of transgression, and the blurring of boundaries. Did you know that she was also the goddess of gender fluidity? I thought that was too on the nose to be true, but it is. This is easy to discover from authoritative sources online, but here's a very short bit from Psychology Today:

‘The Mesopotamian Ishtar, the beautiful goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex, was sometimes represented with a beard to emphasize her more bellicose side. She could change a man into a woman, and the assinnu, kurgarru, and kuku’u who performed her cult had both male and female features.’

Cahn asks what it would mean for America to fall into the worship of Ishtar?

‘We would expect a transformation to begin that would alter the realm of sexuality. With the goddess's entrance we would expect biblical standards and ethics surrounding sexuality and marriage to begin to erode. We would expect the moral foundations and values that had undergirded Western civilization for nearly two thousand years to begin overturning.

‘In short, we would expect there to be a revolution in the realm of sexuality -- a sexual revolution.’

More:

‘Not only did Ishtar introduce, promulgate, and champion sexual immorality -- she sanctified it; she declared it holy. Sexually immoral acts were part of her cult and worship, performed as rites in her temples and shrines. So in the grip of her spirit, the same thing began manifesting in American and Western culture. Sexual immorality was now not only accepted but treated as sacred.

‘Now it was the former standards and restraints that were seen as sinful, puritanical, repressive, and evil. And the one who opposed the newly sanctified sins or failed to adequately revere them was now treated as something of a heretic, and the opposition to the new morality as something akin to blasphemy.’

With the blasphemous Respect for Marriage Act (RfMA), we have reached the end of the usefulness of the current union between the States.  When the Federal City (we no longer want to tarnish the name of General George Washington by associating it with that place; credit to the great Southern historian Dr. Clyde Wilson for the alternative name) begins issuing orders (honor sexual immorality, or else…) that will bring about the spiritual and physical destruction of the peoples of the States, it has become necessary, at the least, to disobey the order, to nullify it, and, at the most, if the Feds try to force the resisting States to surrender to their will, to leave the current union altogether.  And there is no mistaking it:  The RfMA includes provisions to force States to comply, something court rulings, as bad as they are, are unable to do:

The bill would additionally require every state to recognize every same-sex marriage that “is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into.”

The bill also has a “private right of action” clause, which would allow “any person who is harmed by a violation of subsection (b)…[to] bring a civil action in the appropriate district court of the United States against the person who violated such a subsection for declaratory and injunctive relief.” Likewise, attorneys general would be able to bring civil action against any person who violates the law.

Secessionist sentiment is already rising.  Both Daniel Horowitz and Dr. Steve Turley have shown that conclusively.  It may be about to explode thanks to anti-laws like the RfMA.

Wise political leadership at this moment is crucial.  The grifters/careerists like Billy Nungesser and telegenic comedians like John Kennedy (who try to persuade people to take deadly covid jabs with ridiculous singing and who push for wars that turn out to be money laundering operations for Establishment politicians of both parties) need to step aside so that the more honorable warriors like Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry can take the helm of their respective States and steer us out of the dangerous waters into which we have sailed.

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2022/12/garlington-the-present-union-has-outlived-its-usefulness/.

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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!