The Cathedra Has Moved

After 9 years here and almost 5000 posts, I was itchy for a change of platform. After messing around with this and that, I have moved over to WordPress.

It ain't perfectly comfortable, but if I were to find a blogging platform that's perfectly comfortable, I'd stay here with Blogger. Where I feel kinda overloaded and bored.

So, from now on I shall proclaim infallible truth ex cathedra at

Ex Cathedra 2.0
(Just click on it and you'll be magically taken there!)

See ya there.


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I blame the archons

I was planning to switch over to a new blogging platform with the new year, but discovered that none of them were much to my liking. Still diddling with them.

Endings

A conservative Catholic blog I read has been responding to the recent Vatican document --even though it came from way down the food chain-- which basically tells Catholics to give up any efforts to convert Jews. The functional result of this in the real world is to complete the capitulation of the Church of Rome to yet one more group with a victimist grievance to wave at the West. I await the eventual announcement that since Vatican II said Muslims and Christians worship the same God, they, too, should be declared off limits.

In real life, of course, I have about zero interest in converting Muslims or Jews to Catholicism, but I have a lot of interest in one more Western backbone institution cutting its own throat to please people who hate it.

Thus contextualized, a comment I left at that blog:

Although I have not practiced Catholicism for several decades, it dominated --I used the word factually and without any animus-- my life for my first forty years on earth. Despite my departure from the fold, I realize that, unsurprisingly, I retain some very highly Catholic attitudes, especially since this old altar boy was in his teens before VaticanII erupted. I remember in my bones when it was The One True Church, something I believe that few Catholics now living have any sense of . Anyway, despite whatever bad behavior Catholics have engaged in over two very human millennia, to me The Church has remained functionally eternal. As I said to a Lutheran friend, I may be an apostate Roman but at least I am no Protestant.
 What has shaken my assumption is reviewing the last 50 years in light of what I can only call the antics of the incumbent Pope, whose gift for confusion is unparalleled.
I am not ignorant of Church history, but I cannot recall a previous period in which the Church seemed so willing, eager even, to divest itself of its identifying marks in order to please a surrounding culture that defines itself by its loathing of Christianity.  The cultured despisers that Schliermacher knew were polite by comparison to our contemporaries.

And one of those hostile elements is the Jews. Rome seems to forget that in the real world, the vast majority of Jews (the dominant Ashkenazim anyway) have abandoned their ancient religion in favor of various forms of this-worldly leftist utopianism. If you can find an organization or movement committed to unraveling the Western world’s traditional cultures that is not over-represented with secular Jews, please let me know.
So the placating attitude of the formerly One True Church toward a people whose identity is now based upon an alienated sense of outrage and an almost genetic hatred of Christianity makes me wonder if in fact the Church of Rome really is just one more religious empire that will eventually fade away into history. 

And lest anyone have a fainting spell about the phantom sin of “anti-Semitism,” I use the RC-Jewish dance as just one example. The bizarre desire of a dying German church to please the divorced-remarried by altering the structure of marriage is another…and of the Church’s treasonous support for filling Europe with alien Muslims and Africans I will not speak, lest I dig myself deeper into perdition. 

It is deeply saddening even to an old reprobate like me, that the West’s collapse of self-confidence should have now infected the institution that for 1500 years was our backbone and soul.

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Nine Years Later

I began this blog at the end of 2006; Blogger only began keeping stats in 2010.

My hits peaked in October 2014, with over 134,000 in 30 days. I have no idea why.

As I have said before, I assume that I actually have a maybe a couple of dozen regular actual human readers. All the rest are likely machine-driven searches or there are people who enter a search item in Google, etc. , it leads them to an old post of mine --there are almost 5000 of them-- and they move on.

If I move over to WordPress, the numbers will be countable on my fingers.

Moving on?

The new header pic is a copy of the one from a new ExCathedra blog on another blogging service. I have been toying with the idea, after nine years of very regular ranting, of moving over to something more focussed and streamlined and may just do it in the New Year.

If I do, I will post a link here for a couple of weeks to the new site, so that actual humans who read my infallible mouthings...or pixelings, really... can track me down.



The image is taken from a time-lapse video I saw recently. It is in the Italian Alps, the Sarntal, near Bolzano. The site is called The Stone Men in the local German dialect (it's in the German-speaking north of Italy*) and various stories about them say they are Celtic. At least the core of them are several hundred years old, although new ones have probably been added. They have the primitive look of very Old Europe.

And for reasons I have not been able to figure out, there is a Salem Cross planted in the center. This triple-barred cross has associations and resemblances (sorta like US Constitutional "emanations and penumbras") with the Papacy, the Crusades and Freemasonry...all undertakings of Western men!

The sun is either rising or setting...it's unclear. Which suits my purpose for a man of the Occident/ Abendland thinking of the future of his people. When I had an addition put on my older CelticViking shoulder tattoo a few years ago, it included the word Dunadan...which is Tolkien's Elvish for "Man of the West.


*Back in the 70's when I was a seminarian in Rome and my language skills were at their peak, I wound up as a translator during a tour of the Catacombs. The leader was speaking Italian but there was a red-headed Italian citizen there, a teenage girl, who only spoke German, so American me did the Italian to German translation.

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Speaking of martyrs

on the feast today of St Stephen the Protomartyr, just to let my readers know how much I have to suffer through in my knee rehab process at the gym with my six-foot, 27-year-old trainer..

Painful.

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Boxing Day Miscellany

Due to my 17-year sojourn in The Great (formerly) White North, today is not only the feast of St Stephen the First Martyr, on whose feast Good King Wenceslaus Looked Down, but also Boxing Day, a kind of Brit extension of the holiday, for reasons no one really understands. But it's a nice idea.

Giotto's version, I believe

St Stephen was one of the first seven deacons, an order of the priesthood created by the Apostles in response to the failure of multiculturalism in the early Church. Think I'm kidding? Read for yourself in the Acts of the Apostles, 6:1, and following.

6 But with the believers multiplying rapidly, there were rumblings of discontent. Those who spoke only Greek complained that their widows were being discriminated against, that they were not being given as much food in the daily distribution as the widows who spoke Hebrew. 2 So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers.“We should spend our time preaching, not administering a feeding program,” they said. 3 “Now look around among yourselves, dear brothers, and select seven men, wise and full of the Holy Spirit, who are well thought of by everyone; and we will put them in charge of this business. 4 Then we can spend our time in prayer, preaching, and teaching.”5 This sounded reasonable to the whole assembly, and they elected the following: Stephen (a man unusually full of faith and the Holy Spirit), Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus of Antioch (a Gentile convert to the Jewish faith, who had become a Christian).6 These seven were presented to the apostles, who prayed for them and laid their hands on them in blessing.

Ah, the origins of the bureaucratic race-based welfare state and the Christian diaconate! Of course, the absolutely crucial difference is that this is not a state-run distribution, as it was in the Rome of panem et circenses. Or now with us.

Stephen's energetic preachig enraged his fellow Jews so much that he was condemned to death by stoning (Sharia did not come from nowhere!) and one Saul, who acted as coat-check boy for the men who did the deed, later became the famous 13th Apostle Paul. (On the far left in the pic above)  Acts 7: 54-60, if you're interested.  The Wikipedia article on him, no surprise, mentions that some find his attitude, gasp, "anti-Jewish." Sigh. Christianity, as the neo-heathens never cease to remind us, arose within the not entirely uniform Judaism of the Second Temple as a fight among Jews.

And for your Schadenfreudenal enjoyment, speaking of martyrs, a White liberal in South Africa who decided to open his farm for Black refugees fleeing "xenophobia"  is now, the wake of the Africans' split into two hostile groups, in fear of his life and that of his wife and ten children. A prisoner of the savage people he wanted to help. Well deserved, I say, and a perfect example of The Most Foolish People On The Planet (c). 

Happy St. Stephen Boxing Day!

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Oddity

At Christmastime I sometimes lay aside my Genghis Khan attitude toward the world and get sentimental and past-oriented, remembering all the Christmases of my childhood and the generation of my parents and grandparents.

I watch, I confess, the 1971 pilot episode of The Waltons, the Christmas story called The Homecoming. Yes, I know. Shocking.

(Spoiler alert for you softies who might ever watch this.)

But the odd thing about this story --aside from portraying a romantic vision of a lost America in 1930's rural Virginia-- is the conflict between Momma (Patricia Neal) and John Boy (Richard Thomas) over the 17-year old boy's habit of locking the door to his bedroom.

Now anyone with half a brain might suspect what an adolescent male was doing in his bedroom at that age and why he wanted the door locked. So the mother's accusatory and suspicious persistence about it is, well, kinda creepy.

Turns out that John Boy is not doing what we all assume he was doing, but is writing. And since he is being raised for a trade, he is hiding it from his family.

Odd.

Given its time, it does nod to the PC pieties about race that now suffocate us, but from the perspective of 2015, it has a quality that you can't count on anymore in drama or comedy, where it pokes fun at its characters but never holds them in contempt.

The inter-generational family solidarity, the vibrant relations of men and women as different beings, the overt religion, the connections of a rural community,--segregated but friendly-- etc. well, romantic though it be,  has a dignity that any attempt to portray a contemporary family would find almost impossible to carry off.

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Merry Christmas 2015

Cons and Pros

My dear friend L is a Unitarian Universalist minister. We have known each other for 30 years or so. She has remained mostly the liberal that I was back then while I have, well, plummeted from grace at increasing velocities over the years.

She linked with approval to a Facebook post whose uplifting cheerleader message was, "You can do this because you are badass."

And here is the profile pic for the badass in question:

Scares the shit outta me, that's for sure!

And to make up to my readers for inflicting this testostrone-erasing picture on you, an offering in atonement:

Porn actor Jeff Allen.  Back in the late 90's-early 00's he was, IMHO, as close to perfect as a man could get. 

Now balance has been restored to The Force.

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