WHY BELLOC STILL BOTHERS THEM

The hunting season on Hilaire Belloc has never really ended.

It began in his lifetime and finding fault with this incomparable writer has remained the favorite sport of many minds since, some of those minds quite shallow and some quite brilliant.  His biographers have followed suit, finding his prose delightful but his insights - to use their well-worn word - "troubling".  Even the biographers most sympathetic to him have, strangely, not understood him.  It is hard to understand a man who is Catholic to the very core of his being.  Such men are few in history.

But the pot-shots aimed in his direction keep-a-coming and nearly all of them come from those who either have never read him, or read him only very superficially.  Many Catholics, both of the Modernist variety and those of the Catholic variety, find it necessary to dust off the old subject and come gunning for the man whose very name is a synonym for an intensely strong and virile Faith.  We came across this somewhat recent example from Britain's Catholic Herald: 

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2011/12/05/is-belloc-best-forgotten/

The author is a Catholic priest, Father Lucie-Smith.  We might say he is evidently a Catholic priest who is not too much in tune with his Church's glorious past.  We might say with some justification that he has not as yet been gifted with a "sensus Catholicus", that manner of thinking which sees everything with the eyes of that Faith which is completely true and which was presented to the world by the Son of God Himself and therefore from God Himself.  A Catholic man without a sensus Catholicus is a man who is easily buffeted by winds coming from all directions for he has not anchored himself to those truths which came from his Creator.  Nor is this a particularly harsh judgment of the man.  For all I know he may be a prayerful, orthodox priest who says a reverent Mass and lives the pure and challenging life of a man in Holy Orders.  But being such a man and such a priest does not necessarily give him greater insights into historical or even religious matters.  He is, after all, a man, like all of us fallible and human.

What he could and should be, is well-read.  Reading the article it is evident that he is surprisingly uncurious about a whole body of literature that came to be known in the early years of the 20th century in England as the Catholic Literary Revival.  He criticizes Belloc for the very same views held by other notable Catholics of the day, Cardinal Manning, J.B. Morton, Chesterton, Wyndham-Lewis and Hollis among others.  If he is going to castigate Belloc for these "troubling" views he is going to have to apply the same dislike to a number of other eminent men whose thinking matches the thinking of Hilaire Belloc.  But Belloc is, in my view, still a  favorite target because he is so thoroughly Catholic.  Modern Catholics cannot understand a Catholic like this.  Such men are looked upon as sadly prehistoric.  They will tolerate, even admire, Chesterton mainly because he is perhaps a bit more gentle in his prose, but for the forthright Mr Belloc they shudder and turn away.  He is much too direct for the modern taste.

Consider the sentence which closes the first paragraph of Father Lucie-Smith's article:

       "I have never read anything substantial by Belloc."

What is one to make of such a sentence?  Really, such a remark is unworthy of comment, as it can only bring embarrassment to its author.  Yet undaunted he continues on in much the same vein throughout the rest of the piece.

To say that Hilaire Belloc never wrote anything substantial is pretty much an admission that you have never opened the pages of one of his books.  That would be the most charitable explanation.  The less charitable explanation is that he has completely severed any connection with Catholicism's past and, therefore cannot understand what the Church has handed down over its 2,000 year history.

Reading Belloc is like living through the times he is writing about.  He had that uncanny ability to bring the reader a perfect understanding of the time, people and place.  His judgments were nearly always sound, and though I would be a poor admirer of the man if I did not point out that he did seem to misjudge certain historical events, most notably (and oddly), the French Revolution, I would be poorer still if I did not see the perfect rightness of his overall views as to how the Catholic Church built civilization, and the minute details of, say, the English Reformation.  No other historian has more clearly explained what exactly happened in England when after a thousand years it decided to cast off its Faith.

Father Lucie-Smith again:

     "His history books are very thin on fact and solid research, and long on argument, and the arguments, one gets the impression, are repeated again and again."

When I was a boy in school my teachers, bless their hearts, had to hammer into my mind again and again certain points which my dreamer's mind failed to grasp.  Spaced repetition is sound learning technique.  It is the technique Belloc used to get his points across, apparently to the dismay of critics like Father Lucie-Smith.  If the good Father understands Belloc's point after reading it once, well and good.  He is far more gifted than more obtuse souls like the present writer.  But we can always use a reminder and Belloc was there to give us those reminders.  And with the gift for prose writing that he had every word was music.  As to Lucie-Smith's remark that Belloc's books are "thin on fact and solid research" all I can say is that we readers would have been edified if he had produced several examples to support such a statement.  However, we look in vain for those examples for he doesn't offer any.

He finds Belloc's delightful The Path to Rome "unreadable".  That would surely qualify him for the honor of being in the one-of-a-kind category.  Even Belloc's most furious detractors are charmed by that book, which makes one wonder if Father Lucie-Smith is here possibly engaging in mere cheap shots.  Unreadable?  Father embarrasses himself with such comments.  Can anyone be so dead as to not enjoy that wonderful book?  If Father Lucie-Smith had merely written that the work of Belloc does not appeal to him that would have been simple enough to say.  We would have understood and let it go at that.  But for Father to say that so towering a figure in English letters writes essentially rubbish, except for a few charming children's books, is to suggest that we are in the presence of someone who has only a very superficial knowledge of literature, more importantly historical literature.

Here is a bit of Belloc, writing in "The Great Heresies" about the coming modern attack upon the Church (the book was written in 1938):

"I say again, the Modern Attack on the Faith will have in the moral field a thousand evil fruits, and of these many are apparent today, but the characteristic one, the one presumably the most permanent, is the institution everywhere of cruelty accompanied by a contempt for justice."

Insubstantial?  That might have been written today. 

A recent blog post on Linen on the Hedgerow highlights a statistical study of conversions to the Catholic faith in England over a century and more.  In the graph which is shown it is interesting to note that conversions spiked precisely during those years (1920 - 1940) when strong Catholic authors like Hilaire Belloc were writing their insubstantial books.  It is needless to note when the decline in conversions took place but suffice it to say that it coincided with a certain calamitous event in the early 1960s and it also coincided with the loss of vibrant Catholic writing.  Illness put an end to Belloc's writing in 1942.  The Second World War began the slow Catholic decline and even though there were a few spikes here and there in the 1950s the bottom fell out in the swinging 60s.  Yet the fact that Englishmen were becoming Catholics while great Catholic writers were writing is the most eloquent testimony to the importance of the Bellocs, the Waughs, the Knoxes, Feeneys, Chestertons, Barings and many others like them.

Father Lucie-Smith tells us at the outset of his article that in his view Hilaire Belloc is best forgotten.  I would say to him that he can rest well in the assurance that that will not happen.  True, probably not one in a thousand Catholics today, clergy or layman, has ever heard of Belloc but that will change when the Church comes back to Her senses.  It is not Belloc who will be forgotten but those who refuse to be taught by him.

In all fairness to Father Lucie-Smith he does end his article on a reasonably kindly note toward the man.  Perhaps he at last saw something in this noble Catholic apologist that gave him pause.  It is our hope that the good Father will find a quiet time to open up not a biography of Hilaire Belloc but a work written by him.  Any book by him.  May he, like us, enjoy the bird song that is the lovely prose of one of the finest authors who ever put pen to paper.

"THE AUSTRALIAN" REPORTS ON THE CRIME

From The Australian (via The Times of Europe) comes a report on the brewing scandal.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/rent-boy-scandal-rocks-the-vatican/story-fnb64oi6-1226670396654

Is referencing this mere scandal-mongering?  All one can say is that if it brings this ugly business to a complete and final end then it will have accomplished something.

Anyone who imagines that it pleases this writer to write about such awful things has another thing coming.

UPDATE 28 June 2013:

We are now hearing some back-tracking on this story, supposedly from the Italian police.  The back-tracking itself, however, has a funny smell to it. We will keep watching and waiting.

VERMIN IN CASSOCKS

The bombshell appears to have been dropped.  The poofs are scrambling like rats.  Thus far, no comment from the Pope.

It is oddly interesting that this news comes within 24 hours of the decision of five robed idiots in Washington who imagine they are dispensing justice to push the sodomy cause even further.

If the story is accurate we should recall this:  the revelations are not new.  But it is justice that the cover of these clerical queers was blown by one of their own (recalling the Rembert Weakland case).  After the rather sickening spectacle of the mealy-mouthed response of Bishops like Dolan and Listecki to yesterday's Supreme court debacle it is good to know that the mask is dropping off the filthy faces of some of these vermin in cassocks.

With thanks to Linen on the Hedgerow, The Eponymous Flower and other fine blogs for covering this sordid story.

St Joseph, Terror of Demons, ora pro nobis.

NOW WILL YOU SAY SOMETHING, YOUR EXCELLENCIES?

As expected the Divine Oracles in Washington DC have voted to enshrine sodomy...again.  Imagine, an innocent child - now think about this for a moment, especially YOU, Your Excellencies, and Your Holiness - imagine an innocent child being adopted by two sexual perverts.

Does even that, Excellencies, move you to thunder from your pulpits?  Or will you continue to be obedient little Americans and diplomats and keep your collective mouths shut?  And dear Holy Father, will you, at least in this instance, take the beatific smile from your face and condemn this action of the Americans and other countries that have succumbed to the promotion of legal pederasty?  Is silence, and smiles, and diplomacy more important than watching the horrifying and vile corruption of an innocent child?

The world awaits your response, Holy Father, and You Bishops of the Catholic Church.  Will you give aid and comfort to the Church's enemies by remaining silent, or will you protect your children from the persecution that is now at our front door?

Will you now, at long last, say something?

DAN BROWN IMPROVES ON DANTE

Mr Dan Brown, looking suitably inscrutable and very happy with his 6th grade vocabulary

Dante, who need have no worries about being forgotten, unlike the gentleman pictured above

Mr Dan Brown, author of numerous books which generally have a Gunning-Fog reader index of just above the 6th Grade level, has announced that he has been inspired by no less than Dante himself when compiling his latest farrago, "Inferno".  Consider: we are asked to believe that a writer of instantly forgettable nonsense and who writes at a grammar school level is hoping we will accept him as a new Dante.  Or at least as someone who can perhaps "channel" Dante himself.

Goodness.

One can only pity Mr Brown.  Can self-delusion be carried any further than this?

Writing for The Guardian, Peter Conrad dismissed the book's content saying, among other things: "Inferno is also dreadful, abounding in malapropisms and solecisms, leaden restatements of the obvious and naive disinformation about the reality outside the bat-thronged belfry that is Brown's head."  Mr Conrad might be distressed to learn that this book has already become a best seller in America.  Assuming that millionaire Brown did not buy most of those books himself we must assume that the cultural level of the American public is not terribly high.

Wikipedia describes the plot:

"Harvard University professor Robert Langdon wakes up in a hospital with a head wound and no memory of the last few days. His last memory is walking on the Harvard campus, but he quickly realizes that he is now in Florence. Sienna Brooks, one of the doctors tending to him, tells him he suffered a concussion from being grazed by a bullet, and had stumbled into the emergency ward. Suddenly, Vayentha, a female assassin who has been following Robert, breaks into the hospital, shoots the doctor in charge of Robert's care, and approaches Robert's room. Sienna grabs Robert and they flee to her apartment."

That is the first paragraph.  Anyone wanting to read beyond that deserves high praise for stamina. 

And in reading this first paragraph I believe we can confidently assume that Dante need have no worries about a budding rival. 

It is always fun when these newly-hatched "best selling writers" turn up out of the ether.  Dear Kitty Muggeridge would refer to them as having "risen without trace".  True enough.  They are nonentities propped up solely by American marketing know-how and by nothing else.  And the stupider and more infantile their books are the more they are lapped up by the public, the same public that presumably follows every story about the "celebs" whose decidedly uninteresting mugs grace all the latest and greatest tabloids found at the supermarket checkout counter, or on msn, yahoo and everybody else's home pages.

What a taste we must have for the idiotic.  The movie Avatar grosses millions and the literary droolings of Mr Brown sell in the millions.  It is a bit frightening to think that those who gulp down this stuff can be our neighbors, our friends even some of our family members.  Are we really that witless of a society?

Still, all is not lost.  There are pockets of people around the world who read Dostoevsky and Chesterton instead of Brown, or see films by Jean Renoir and John Ford instead of James Cameron and whoever else has come out of nowhere to become an acclaimed movie director.  Culture will survive, in the quiet solitude of an exquisite church, in the beauty of the sounds produced by Beethoven and Palestrina or even in the simple joys of a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Taking notice of professional amateurs like Mr Brown offers both amusement and consternation: amusement that such corny forays into his unique brand of conspiratorial literature are such easy targets for those whose minds have not been turned into wallpaper paste by multinational corporations and their media, and consternation that so many of our fellow citizens take this bilge seriously.

Yet we should not judge too harshly here.  Mr Brown's writings do have their uses particularly for those who have budgies or parrots at home. 

"RE-CYCLED OLD STUFF"

From RT Today:

 http://rt.com/news/israel-torture-palestinian-children-004/

Like most of the world I never believed the story that the Palestinians were using their own children as human shields in their fights with the occupiers of their country.  The idea was utter rubbish and no sensible person believed it.

But apparently we were all wrong.  Palestinian children were in fact being used as human shields...but not by their parents.  Or by Palestinians at all.  The above link to the RT story spells out the whole hideous picture.  It also explains the relentless campaign of propaganda and disinformation that was and is constantly being fed to us by the pro-occupation press.

The perpetrators of this barbarous practice call this story "recycled old stuff".  Perhaps Pope Francis could bring up this old stuff when he pays his obligatory visit to the Holy Land and makes merry with his hosts. 

SECRECY OR THE CONSTITUTION?

I am not stupid.  I realize that the US Constitution has been a dead letter now for well over a century.  But if for a moment we want to revive some of the principles enumerated in that flawed document we might wish to examine what is in fact the central point buried within the NSA spying scandal,

As always, the level-headed Judge Andrew Napolitano has found that central point and explained it well:

http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano107.html

The judge points out that the less-than-perfect whistleblower took two oaths when he went to work for the organization that helps the US government spy on everyone.  The fist oath was to keep secret everything he was doing.  The second oath was to uphold the Constitution.  Given the circumstances of the case he decided he could not keep both oaths, so he broke one.

I am both amused and somewhat disgusted by all the writers and bloggers who are dumping on this man Snowden because he "broke the law" or "damaged the USA", etc., etc. ad nauseam.   It astounds me that these good people are entirely and completely missing the point.  Their patriotism is so intense that it appears to blind them to simple reality.  That reality is that the US government - the same government that is pushing sodomy, abortion, usury, ignorance, unjust wars of aggression, the lining of the pockets of uberCapitalists while destroying property rights and cheating laborers out of their just wages...that government - is now so paranoid that it is watching everything we (and many others around the globe) are saying and doing, in real time, around the clock.

What kind of a government does this sort of thing?

The kind of government headed by Joe Stalin.

915: THE INCONVENIENT CANON

I am grateful to that grand lady, Mrs Daphne McLeod of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for bringing to our attention the existence of a petition to be addressed to Rome regarding the forgotten Canon 915, which requires the withholding of the Sacred Species from those who are in manifest grave sin.

The petition information can be found here:  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/discipline-dissenters-apply-church-law/

Not that respecting the gravity of the situation means anything to prelates like Donald Wuerl or to ubiquitous online "supercanonists" who twist themselves into knots trying to make the Canon mean something it does not.  But here is the situation in a nutshell: priests, Bishops and Cardinals are giving Holy Communion to public sinners and persecutors of the Church like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, pro-abortion politicians, etc.  Full stop.

Now either we believe that the Holy Communion wafer contains the Body and Blood of the Son of God, or we don't.   I have no idea what Donald Wuerl believes and others like him but I do know what the Church believes and  teaches on this simple point.  One does not need to have a degree in Theology to know what receiving God unworthily lets us in for.

We were taught that before receiving the Holy Eucharist we were to confess our sins especially serious, mortal sins to a priest before we could approach the altar rail.  Perhaps we missed Mrs Pelosi and Mr Biden in the Confession line but I cannot recall them amending their pro-abortion, pro-sodomy ways after their unworthy reception of Communion.

The question must always be asked if petitions to Rome ever do any good.  It's a reasonable question.  I have no answer to it, alas.  How many petitions were sent to Rome about the unspeakable Rembert Weakland which went unanswered and ignored?  He was never removed.  He removed himself only after being exposed as a poof.  The same with Cardinal O'Brien.  The list goes on.  Regardless of whether petitions do any good or not, or to what extent they do some good, it is praiseworthy to let the Vatican know, especially in cases of outrages as horrifying as this that Christ should be mocked no longer.

We at The Eye Witness commend Daphne McLeod, and the members of the Catholic Truth Society, for organizing this vital work.

"Joanna", from marypages.com

TALES OF THE LOVING LGBT COMMUNITY

Jeffrey Curley, who had the misfortune of meeting someone who was "born that way"

Again we remind our readers as best we can of the ravages of the lifestyle of the perverse, and once again we warn you that the details of the case we present are hideous.  We trust the wise leaders of the Boy Scouts might take note, as well as some wise men in the Church, such as Cardinal Danneels, who are so worried about hurting the feelings of child-molesting homosexuals.

The late Father Andrew Greeley claimed to know some secrets about the homosexual mafia well ensconced in the Archdiocese of Chicago.  He intimated that they were responsible for at least two murders.  I am not surprised, and the story I will refer you to bears out what everyone knows about that side of poofdom that no one wants to talk about.

But we want to talk about it:  http://www.freedomisknowledge.com/otw/barbaracurleyintro.htm

Mr and Mrs Curley, whose son was murdered by a homosexual

THE HEALING OF RUSSIA

There is a nagging thought going through our heads here at The Eye-Witness that something wonderful is happening in Russia.  This poor country, which has suffered multiple crucifixions over the last century and before, would appear to be emerging from the swamps and entering into a phase of restoration.  Are we perhaps witnessing a Russian renaissance?

Today we hear news of another small but important indication that makes one wonder if Russia is to be the country that will henceforth be doing Heaven's work.  Our friends at The Eponymous Flower blog site alert us to this happy development in the land loved by the Blessed Virgin Mary:

http://eponymousflower.blogspot.com/2013/06/russian-pro-morality-bill-passes-west.html

And then there is this news, also startling in nature, and hardly insignificant:

http://www.romereports.com/palio/russian-faithful-allowed-corpus-christi-procession-after-95-years-english-10214.html#.UbiR9diW5a8

Within one week we see the pernicious sodomites in Russia slapped down again (following other recent moves to limit the influence of the homosexual contagion) and we see a Corpus Christi procession process through the streets unfettered.  While America and other countries are continually blackened by crimes against nature being foisted upon the citizens by their own government we see, in an amazing reversal, Russia going in the opposite direction.  Russia was once the persecutor of peoples; will it now be their rescuer?

Russia is ruled by a man named Vladimir Putin.  Whatever his faults may have been in the past or in the present he is the polar opposite of the creeps and criminals who are elected to high political office in America.  Russia still, to this admittedly uninformed observer, is making a mistake or two, like being overly deferential to the US government on certain crucial issues and being far too trusting of the likes of Mr Obama.  Perhaps that will change in time.  If the resistance on the part of Russia's leaders to help out in another US/Israel war of aggression in Syria is any indication perhaps Russians will begin to realize that these two countries are oppressive and rotting from the inside.  One hopes Russia will begin to smell the stench and keep its distance from these two troubled regimes.

Dear Russia had its Lenins, its Trotskys, its Stalins and its secret police goons.  Russia is slowly cleansing itself from these past evils.  America, conversely, is embracing them and is fast turning into a tyranny worse than the Nazi and Communist ones.  The Communists and the Nazis killed the bodies of men; the American oligarchs want to kill men's souls - by forcing men to abandon simple decency and morality using the legal system, the corporate-controlled media and the full force of government organs of oppression.

Predictably the media is literally foaming at the mouth over Russia's great and sensible move to limit the spread of perverse propaganda.  It is amusing watching and reading their comments on this.  We suggest you glance at them as well, and enjoy the spectacle of these spluttering, spittle-dripping commissars decrying Russia for coming back to its senses.

There is still much to be done in that holy land to bring back normalcy.  Among other things Russia is still plagued by abortion, a crime that makes Heaven not only weep but think of vengeance.  Eighty years of pro-abortion propaganda and abortions from the Communists has, tragically, made it acceptable.  To eradicate this unspeakable evil may, sadly, take some time, but with God all things are possible.  Catholics know that Russia's complete return to happiness and God's good graces would be facilitated if only our Popes would have listened to the very words of the Blessed Virgin some 90+ years ago.  But cowardice and contempt have prevented them from acting on the instructions they were given.  Like the King of France, who also dithered before acting on Heaven's command, great misery will come to them for this refusal.

Nevertheless, the Mother of God loves Russia.  These recent events are the obvious proof of that.

UPDATE 15 June 2013:

We saw this at The Remnant webiste, and thought we should pass along these words of genuine wisdom:
http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=10522

THE TYRANT HAS NO CLOTHES

In the event that you may not have been aware of what has been going on in the Benighted States of America, the worldwide all-seeing eye of Big Brother has been watching you, every day, all the time.  The Fourth Amendment is now officially dead, joining the other deceased protections from government predations that Americans once enjoyed.

Two tyrants, the hapless and stupid George Bush and the evil and mendacious Barack Obama, have set in motion a system of surveillance unprecedented in the history of the world.  Up until now the cut-rate Stalins who have been our "presidents" have, through fear and intimidation, kept this all under wraps.

Until now.  A whistleblower has come forward.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance?CMP=twt_gu

The two Official Parties have said little to nothing, other than such deeply thoughtful men as Republican Senators Lindsay Graham and John McCain, the two who never met a war they didn't like, who are both cheering on the junior G men trashing our right to be left alone and unbothered by a ubiquitous police state.  A few Senators, like the execrable Dianne Feinstein, are calling for the whistleblower's extradition and, presumably, lynching.

Washington and New York feel pretty confident that they have nothing to worry about.  They think it will all blow over and that everyone will soon settle back onto their couches and watch the latest raw sewage pumped from Hollywood (and  New York.  Always New York) via our TV screens, splashed into our homes.  Perhaps they haven't anything to worry about from weak-willed Americans who don't want to get "involved".  We shall see.

But the extent of the abuse is, every day being more and more revealed.  For instance, this morning we read the startling news that another country has been doing some of Uncle Sam's dirty work:

http://www.businessinsider.com/israelis-bugged-the-us-for-the-nsa-2013-6

No free people will survive when this sort of thing is allowed to continue.

All conflicts are religious in nature, even this one when you look at it dispassionately.  And given the clear signals that the US government has been sending, namely: that Catholics are in their crosshairs (as are any others who might get uppity and oppose Organized Buggery and Organized Sadism), we might start to begin taking this seriously.

Our Catholic brothers in France have shown the way when they converged on Paris to fight state-imposed sodomy.  What are we going to do here in America about things like this?

UPDATE 13 June 2013:

It gets stranger and stranger:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/2/

SATURDAY NIGHT CATHOLICS

The Cathedral at Rheims

I realize that the title of this little piece might be taken in an offensive manner by some but it is not intended so.  Rather, it is our small contribution to the effort of keeping holy the Lord's Day.  Which is Sunday.  Not Saturday.

Obviously, the situation I am referring to is the now common practice of Roman Catholics keeping their Sundays free for relaxing, shopping, sports and fun by getting Holy Mass out of the way on the previous Saturday night...preferably around 4:30, so that it doesn't interrupt the dinner hour.  Everyone knows about this; it is unnecessary to elaborate.  Drive by any Catholic church around 4:30 on a Saturday evening and just count the parked cars.  There will be far more than the ones parked there for the 8 a.m. Sunday Mass the next morning.

My very dear Catholic friends, this is a bad idea.

Who and what brought us to this sorry pass?  It is of course the result of those liberalizations to the Church which came in the late 1960s as a result of that Council.  Rome granted this Saturday evening Mass concession and that action has opened up a number of serious problems in both Church and State.  This writer can still remember a time when most stores were closed on Sundays (indeed up until two years ago most stores in England were still closed on Sundays).  That all went by the boards in the late 60s and early 70s.  In most dioceses today the largest Mass attendance figures, apart from the Big Holy Days, are found on Saturday night.  There are two very grave problems with this.  The first is that it has the effect, unintended or not, of erasing the idea in the Catholic mind of keeping holy the Lord's Day.  The second problem is that it increases another activity that is repugnant to God: doing unnecessary servile work on the day of rest.  If we all flock to Wal-Mart or the malls on Sundays we force people to not keep their Sundays holy by doing servile work for their bosses on that day.  This is in addition to our being tempted to shop and spend on a day that should be devoted to Our Lord, our family and our rest.

When the Church, in a very misguided move, allowed the Saturday night "anticipatory" Mass it opened up the Pandora's Box that we are now faced with: Sunday is just another day in the week to spend money and have fun.  The Church still, amazingly, has not recognized the folly of this move.  Not one in a thousand clerics ever mentions these problems.  [Please write to let us know if and when some brave priest or Bishop has brought this up.  We would welcome such information.]  I am deliberately avoiding the issue of the utter banality and ugliness of most of the Masses people have to attend in order to fulfill their Sunday obligation; that is a story for another day.   The problem is that we are not keeping this clear, unequivocal Commandment demanded by our Creator Himself on Mount Sinai.  I hesitate to say that we are telling God that we will decide how to spend our time on His day.

Not a few Saints have stated that the two sins that offend God the most are taking His name in vain and not keeping holy the Lord's day.  If this opinion is true should it not give us all pause?

This is not the time to get into that red-herring discussion about which day is the "true" sabbath, a discussion that is pointless and leads people away from the central issue.  That question, for those interested, was written about in an interesting article found here.

There are those who will say that the Church has the right to make disciplinary adjustments and exceptions.  And, of course, it does.  What is forgotten, however, is the idea that sometimes those adjustments are problematical or imprudent.  The charism of infallibility does not protect the Church or the Pope with regard to disciplinary changes; they are either good, not so good, or poor.  Examples of disastrous disciplinary changes approved by the Vatican abound but two should settle the argument: altar girls and Communion in the hand.  Those two decisions have wreaked havoc on doctrine, liturgy, the sacred and any sense we ever had of Catholicity.  The great Bishop Athanasius Schneider has written well on the debacle of Communion in the hand, and the idiocy of altar girls has been well and truly exposed by the late Michael Davies.  We needn't cover that ground here.  We know these were tragic mistakes.

And so was the decision to allow an anticipatory Saturday evening Mass.  If we would but look at what this has done to doctrine alone, how it has sown the seed of doubt in Catholic minds, we would see that it is something that we who are trying to cling to the Faith should try never to do.  If nothing else this switching from Sunday to Saturday Mass keeps Catholics off-balance.  We are never certain any more.  Who is right?  Who is wrong?  Of course that is the story of the entire Church today.

Our first goal should be to find a Mass that is beautiful, quiet and reverent.  Not easy, I know.  But our second goal should be to attend that Mass on Our Lord's day.  We might also gently tap on the shoulders of our Catholic family members and friends who use the Saturday exception and encourage them to return to the "old way", which is really the right way.  It is my hope that if we can begin to restore to Sunday the proper reverence that such a day is due we will begin to see the end of several problems plaguing the Catholic Church.

THE DIRKHISING CASE: IGNORING THE FACTS WITH GAY ABANDON

We at The Eye Witness like to counter propaganda whenever we can.  We are one of many bloggers who do this.  It is necessary work.

The Jesse Dirkhising case has been pretty much lost down the memory hole thanks to a media which has as its goal the shoving of sodomy into the faces of everyone from cradle to grave.  But it is good to remember this case.  It is not an isolated one.

If you do not have a strong stomach, do not read the details.  I haven't read all the details.  I don't want to.  There is enough, more than enough, in the general reports to give the correct impression.  Searching for the least offensive reporting of the story possible we came across this article:

http://lesfemmes-thetruth.blogspot.com/2009/09/10th-anniversary-of-13-year-old-jesse.html

Mary Ann Kreitzer wrote it and she wrote it very well.  We bring it to the attention of our readers so that we can understand the hellish forces we are up against.  If you know any Boy Scout leaders, you might bring this article to their attention; it will let them know what is very possibly in store for them in the near future.

Don't look for any in-depth reports from the usual disinformation sources.  They are not interested in the truth.  They are the enablers of evil.

There are other cases of murder by homosexuals.  They are also hushed up.  But we are not interested in hushing them up.  Quite the contrary.

MONSATAN...ER, MONSANTO

A French farmer rips out GMO corn from a field. 

Sometimes you just have to sit back and admire the crass, amazing and unbridled chicanery of The Devil's Own corporation, Monsanto.  We write about them often here at The Eye-Witness because it never ceases to amaze us how predatory and downright unscrupulous this company is and how little people seem to care.  So with apologies to those who are tired of the subject, and who can skip on to some other article, we present to you this latest clever move by this amazing bunch of monsters.

http://rt.com/op-edge/monsanto-deception-game-europe-gmo-261/

The article was written by William Engdahl, a perceptive observer of European trends and a man dedicated to the increasingly difficult task of keeping his health in a world awash with fake food.  His article makes for very interesting reading indeed.

The recent "March Against Monsanto" in places around the world, a march not organized by the usual NGOs, initially caught the kindly folks at Monsanto off guard.  It was organized by social media, by real people sick (literally) of what Monsanto is doing to the world's food supply.  This bothered them.  It showed that the opposition to their junk came via a grass-roots effort.  They were unamused that the peons were rising up.  But with that Beelzebub-like facility for always landing on their two feet Monsanto initiated a very clever (you have to admire it) disinformation campaign intended to make the world believe that they were reconsidering their sales efforts in Europe.

Many believe that to be true.  Not so.

Engdahl shows exactly what is happening and how Monsanto has managed it.  They are masters of a Public Relations technique that they and other multinational corporations who prey on hapless consumers have honed to the very last word in perfection.  They really are quite brilliant.

But, then again, so is Mr Engdahl.  And he has got the goods on them.