I have changed the title of my series of novels from CONCILIAR to SIXTIES because the series, as it has developed, has become more about the society and politics of the 1960s revolution (1960-1975) than about the Conciliar Church which is a part of the Sixties revolution. The next two titles, THE DREAM BECOMES A NIGHTMARE and A SENSE OF LOSS will continue the focus on the upheaval within Australian society.
Category Archives: Western Civilization
Recommended books
Socially and politically oriented Youtube channels often interview authors of books that have captured the reading public’s attention.
The books below attracted my attention because they give powerful arguments and evidence against the Woke class’s condemnation of Western Civilization.
The final two by Timothy Gordon and his wife, Stephanie, are so ‘out there’ on the fringes for most conservatives that they will not consider them. The books, however, restate age-old beliefs about men’s natural leadership and women’s role as organizer of the domestic sphere.
I intend to add to the list whenever I came across book of similar interest.
Against Decolonization: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Doug Stokes
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar
The Case for Colonialism, Bruce Gilley
Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington
The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, Carrie Gress
Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation, Rachel Wilson
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The Case for Patriarchy – Timothy Gordon
Ask Your Husband: A Wife’s Guide to True Femininity, Mrs Timothy. J. Gordon
Political thuggery in the Church
I baulk at charging Pope Francis with vicious political thuggery over the Motu Proprio Traditiones Custodes, the papal document whose objective is ‘to disappear’ the Mass of the centuries. There remains in me a modicum of respect for the papacy despite Francis’s papal profligacy. But I am less reluctant to refrain when it comes to Professor Andrea Grillo at the Pontifical Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome who Dr Peter Kwasniewski calls ‘The Mind Behind the Motu Proprio’ in another outstanding article in OnePeter5.
Indeed, if Andrea Grillo is the virtual author of Traditiones Custodes, I have no hesitation in calling him not only a political thug, in the worst sense of the phrase, but a two-faced hypocritical scoundrel. He, and those like him, don’t have the honesty and backbone to state exactly what their views mean. The image he projects of concern for the same Church of the ages is pretence.
It is only necessary to read Dr Kwasniewski’s first paragraphs in summarizing Grillo views on the Catholic liturgy to know that Grillo belongs to the Church of Rupture. He is a paid-up member of the apostate mob of middle and high Church managers who despise and ridicule those refusing to become members of his brilliant new church.
There are, of course, thousands like Grillo feverishly working to destroy the Church that won’t be destroyed no matter how far they sink their claws into it. They are recognizable by the Marxist dialectic always implicit in their rhetoric. It’s the idea that history proceeds in sets of truths that constantly supersede each other in their advance towards the Omega Point, where all conflict is resolved in an earthly paradise.
The destroyers within the Church are the same as the destroyers outside the Church, seeking to realign humanity with their Marxist ideas. They are the same ferrets and weasels that occupy Toad Hall (an image I have frequently used.) We need a Badger, Rat and Mole with the courage to really take the fight up to Toad Hall occupiers. What does that mean?
It means all bets are off. It means using similar tactics to those occupying the visible Church. It means taking the Church underground with priests refusing the treasonous apostate path of working with the destroyers. It means the faithful supporting those courageous priests. It means Masses in homes, halls and other such venues. It happened in the 1970s when the dissenters suppressed the Mass of the centuries. It should happen again. It must happen again.
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Continue reading Political thuggery in the ChurchCultural vandalism by a culturally hollow elite – we must resist
Once again, I have to ask, ‘How do they get away with it? Why doesn’t somebody do something about these saboteurs and traitors?‘
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The short story is, they are coming for the classics
Frank Furedi, The Australian, 17 October 2021
Why am I not surprised to read the Welsh National Opera will run a series of lectures on Madame Butterfly to highlight issues of “imperialism and colonialism”?
Because in recent years it has become increasingly fashionable to frame Western art and culture in a negative light. All its great inspiring figures, from Chaucer to Shakespeare through to Jane Austen face the charge of being “too Western”, “too white” or “too racist”. Classical music, ballet and opera are also dismissed in a similar vein. Western classical culture has always been the target of dogmatic radical commissars on the grounds it is elitist, out of date, irrelevant and far too exclusive. Now these philistine arguments have fused with those promoted by advocates of identity politics.
Hostility towards Western classical culture is frequently justified on the ground that it is too old, too white, too male and far too homophobic. This point was emphasised recently by a participant in the Gender Equity and Diversity in Opera Summit organised by the Australian Music Centre. Sonya Holowell took great objection to the traditional meritocratic emphasis on quality in the opera world. She dismissed the idea that “quality comes first” on the grounds that it “ignores the inherent privileges that many” are afforded
Her solution is to “decolonise the high arts”. In praise of this form of artistic vandalism she asks, the “pertinent question to me is what do we want to leave intact?” Judging by recent unrestrained attacks on classical culture, the answer must be “not very much”.
Read the rest here…
A look at a traditional seminary
Six weeks ago I posted a video ‘A Day in the Life of a Seminarian. ‘ It depicted daily life in a seminary of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). I made the comment that an SSPX seminarian’s daily activities was little different from a pre-Vatican II seminary. I can speak from experience, having attended a junior seminary 1959-1962. Below is a second video put out by the SSPX, providing a tour of St Thomas Aquinas Seminary. It gives further insight into the daily life of a traditional seminarian.
These two videos also provide a handy background to my novel TIMES OF DISTRESS: A STORY OF UNSWERVING FAITH AND COMMITMENT. The intrigue of the first six chapters takes place in a Dutch seminary in 1940.
Who emptied the Church after Vatican II?
This is an interesting review of an interesting book. The key proposition in the book is that powerful factors outside the Second Vatican Council were the efficient cause of the Church’s collapse and not the council documents themselves, despite the shameless leftist political agitation in the council’s session. Fr Jennings writes that historian of religion Callum Brown observed:
For organised Christianity, the sixties constituted the most concentrated period of crisis since the Reformation; but what was at stake became perceived as the very survival of Christian society and values. In this respect certainly, the sixties may turn out to have been more important than even the Renaissance and Reformation. (p. 135)
I lived through the 1960s as a young adult and I can well believe it. The cultural revolution turned everything on its head. I look closely at the student radical activity at Sydney University in my book TONY ABBOTT AND THE TIMES OF REVOLUTION.
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Why have all the Catholics gone?
A masterful examination of historical, moral and theological factors in the diminution of the Catholic Church in the UK and US after Vatican II.
by Fr Gavan JenningsMar 11, 2021
Mass Exodus: Catholic disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II
by Stephen Bullivant, Oxford University Press, 2019, 309 pp
Stephen Bullivant is Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion, and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society. He holds doctorates in Theology (Oxford, 2009) and Sociology (Warwick, 2019). He has written several books on the Catholic faith, the loss of faith, and atheism.
The book is essentially a dispassionate, intensely scholarly examination of the question whether the unprecedented “mass exodus” of Catholics from the Church since the 1960s is a direct consequence, as many believe, of the reforms inaugurated by Vatican Council II (1962-’65).
Bullivant begins his investigation by looking at one of the great aims of the Council: to stir the lay faithful of the Church from passivity and insularity and to waken in them their baptismal call to holiness and apostolate. Instead, the Council appears to have succeeded only in having the faithful disaffiliate as never before in Church history.
From this unprecedented falling away in the years following the Council, it is tempting to draw the inference: post concilium, ergo propter concilium (after the Council, therefore because of the Council). And so “One of the primary purposes of this monograph is to investigate whether, how, and to what extent that implication is true — at least, in Britain and the USA” ( p. 12).
Read the rest here…
Good literature necessary for restoration of Christianity
Archbishop Viganò on the importance of good literature for the restoration of Christianity
December 1, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has recently written a preface for a book, Gratitude, Contemplation, and the Sacramental Worth of Catholic Literature, a collection of essays written by my husband Dr. Robert Hickson over the course of several decades. Being a distillation of his life work, this new book aims at presenting to the readers a whole set of inspiring books – most of them Catholic – that can help us restore a Catholic memory. That is to say, these books can help us revive a sense of Catholicity that comes to us from time periods and regions where the Catholic faith was an integral part of the state and society, from a lived faith.
We are very grateful to Archbishop Viganò for his preface, which highlights the importance of culture – and importantly, literature – for the revival of Christianity, and therefore we decided to publish it here (see full text below). His comments aim at turning our minds to the future, preparing the ground for a time where Christ again will reign in the heart and minds of man. His preface is therefore a sort of manifesto of faith and hope, and a wonderful instruction for us on how to go about preparing the ground for Christ.
Read the rest here…
Pride and Prejudice again
I often wonder what Jane Austen would have thought of the intense interest in her writings more two hundreds years further on. I wonder whether it had entered her mind that her books would gain a worldwide audience, and her popularity only grow. On the second, I think the answer would be a definite no. It never occurred to her. On the evidence, all she hoped for was the publication of her novels and their acceptance.
On the first, I think she would have been stunned, flabbergasted – and appalled. Appalled at the interpretation by some who attribute political views to her she did not hold. Feminists have given her the status of a feminist icon while the evidence speaks against this.
Jane Austen was a devout Christian, leaning to the High Church of England. Her traditional Christian beliefs, which include the idea of an ordered world, would disqualify this picture before we look at other evidence. In her novels, she savages a range of female types – the stupid, the ignorant, the neurotic, the manipulative, the deceitful, the cruel, and the list goes on. The heartless Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park is perhaps the most vile female character in English fiction.
Continue reading Pride and Prejudice againArchbishop Vigano condemns Vatican II
If Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano had not shaken up Church and state enough with his Open Letter to President Trump, highlighting the workings of the the Dark State in Church and (Christian) society, he has sent an explosive condemnation of the Second Vatican Council into the political and religious arena.
What he has done, in my view, is that more than fifty years after the Council he has been forced to admit Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was right in his criticisms. He has fallen into line with what many Traditional Catholics have claimed all this time. It is a massive breakthrough for the Resistance to the ongoing attempts within to destroy the One True and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. Here is the text of the archbishop’s essay as it appeared on Life Site News:
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“From Vatican II onwards, a parallel church was built…”
VIGANÒ on REVOLUTION in the CHURCH:
by + Carlo Maria Viganò
I read with great interest the essay of His Excellency Athanasius Schneider published on LifeSiteNews on June 1, subsequently translated into Italian by Chiesa e post concilio, entitled There is no divine positive will or natural right to the diversity of religions. His Excellency’s study summarizes, with the clarity that distinguishes the words of those who speak according to Christ, the objections against the presumed legitimacy of the exercise of religious freedom that the Second Vatican Council theorized, contradicting the testimony of Sacred Scripture and the voice of Tradition, as well as the Catholic Magisterium which is the faithful guardian of both.
Continue reading Archbishop Vigano condemns Vatican IISolve et Coagula and the deep Church
Viganò Warns Trump of Baphomet Inscription: Solve et Coagula and Infiltration of Deep Church
Dr Taylor Marshall
What did Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò mean when he warned President Donald Trump with the obscure Latin phrase: Solve et Coagula – which is the tattoo printed on the two forearms of the Free-masonic Sabbatic Goat? (See previous post)
It’s also tattooed on the wrist of Harry Potter author J K Rowling. What does it mean for the Harry Potter series that Rowling may dabble in the Occult?
Dr. Marshall explains what “Solve et Coagula” means and why occultists and magicians use the term. It’s a profound yet subtle warning by a Catholic Archbishop to the American President.
Archbishop Viganò, the former Papal Nuncio to Washington DC, published an open letter to President Donald Trump claiming that pandemic misinformation and unrest in the cities are signs of a Deep State and a Deep Church inspired by forces of darkness.
Dr. Taylor Marshall reads the letter of Archbishop Vigano and provides commentary based on his last several videos regarding President Trump and our current situation. He also relates it to his research found his book Infiltration about the “Deep Church” being infiltrated by secret societies and political entities.