Amazed it even got published

If there is a WAR ON WOMEN there is a truth that there will be some women that will be seen as “traitors” like Anne-Marie Slaughter who says there is a difference between Feminism and Femininity. It does not matter that she is telling the truth that women are not the same as men and that they have a unique roll to fulfill in the world.

“What she is basically saying is what the Church has been saying for years: yes women deserve to be in the house and the senate so to speak but they also should not have to deny who they are as women namely their unique design as life bearers in order to get ahead. The articles are another example of how truth is truth and eventually, no matter how hard we try to suppress it, it does come to the surface."

Whether she is aware of it or not she continually restates the position the church has taken for oh um centuries. here is just one example LETTER OF POPE JOHN PAUL II to Woman.

Sarcasm aside I don't think this is a War on Women but there is a war its a Female Civil War.

I know this is the kind of Quote that gets Chesterton in trouble yet it explains the core of the War. “It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

and

"Well, to get this honest but unpleasant business over, the objection to the Suffragettes is not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On the contrary, it is that they are not militant enough. A revolution is a military thing; it has all the military virtues; one of which is that it comes to an end. Two parties fight with deadly weapons, but under certain rules of arbitrary honor; the party that wins becomes the government and proceeds to govern. The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first, because they are women; and, secondly, because they are very few women. But they can raise something else; which is altogether another pair of shoes. They do not create revolution; what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy." read it here

It still amazes me that there is any honest discussion that anyone can 'have it all'. It is the kind of pursuit that will make you mad precisely because it is totally unattainable this side of the great divide.

Keep Calm and Carry On

True, "You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." but you can celebrate the thing.

Or you could make a study of the thing and learn such neat facts like:

"The most treacherous beard in history was that of Austrian Hans Steininger. It was more than two metres long and he kept it rolled and stowed in a leather pouch, but in 1567 he tripped over it while running from a fire, and perished.

One of the CIA's more insane attempts to destabilise Cuba was to put toxic thallium salts in the shoes of Fidel Castro to make his beard fall out."

‎"But this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.” Matthew 17:21
‎

Our God King to the Bishops

When asked about the HHS mandate that free contraception would lead to free abortion everyone poo-pood the idea “No one is talking about making that step.” I heard a talking head say.

I snickered then knowing abortion is sometimes called after sex contraception. Also when the Government offers something for “free” they expect you to take advantage of that service - by force if necessary. They have to protect their phony baloney jobs - It is for the public good after all and pregnancy IS the monster of our time so grab your torches!!

"In reality there is not that big of a leap between government deciding to subsidize a behavior and government deciding to enforce that behavior by law". In a previous life this was a common saying: “The first one is free the next one will cost you.” (90% percent of those came back with cash).

Note: My home state of Connecticut has made that step.

“The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby” GKC

Well well CT. sure doesnt want any of that gravity.

In our current materialistic culture the self is God and pleasure is the source and summit of life. Consequently any slight to the self is a blasphemy and a denial of pleasure is a mortal sin.

So it is easy to see how many have lost their sense of humor.

“Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.” G.K. Chesterton.

If you make sport of me, a god, I will smite you.

a new documentary

I love the whole idea of this.

Learn more about it here release date is sometime in 2013 if they don't run out of money.

I am fairly sure this film won't be playing in a cinaplex near you, (or anyone for that matter), so keep an ear out maybe your local Knights of Columbus will host a screening.

Along with the poets song writers have also been curiously silent the subject of cheese -  tomatoes on the other hand...

Tony's feast day

Really, who doesn't love this guy.

This prayer has always worked for me:

Anthony, Anthony
I've looked all around
somethings been lost
and can't be found.

Dear St Anthony i pray
bring it back with out delay.

When I was coaching and one of my players was off their game, we said that prayer together. It worked.

or what grandma taught her daughters

Anthony Anthony
find me a man
as fast as you can.

My Grand mother had a very personal relationship with the saints. There were several statues of her favorites around her house. She would talk to them and offer up novenas through them for certain things to happen. If after such a novena, to a particular saint, the thing she wanted did not happen she would show her disappointment in them by turning that saints statue upside down.

When we would visit her we could tell what kind of mood she would be in by how many statues were upside down.

Saint Anthony got a real work out in my Grandma's life time yet his statue was rarely upside down.

I saw a very delightfuldocumentary, "A Model for Matisse: The Story of the Vence Chapel"the other night and recommended it to any one you likes art, nuns, monks, architecture, intrigue and agape love.

(now on Netflix)

Yes, I am a big fan of Matisse and have always loved the Chapelle du Rosaire. If I believed in a bucket list visiting that chapel would be high on that list.

As an artist, that work is a true inspiration to me being that Matisse began that work when he was 77 (it is his master piece) showing that is never too late and great work does not always happen in the fire of youth.

I knew of  Sister Jacques-Marie as an art history footnote until seeing this film. Simply put without her this Chapel would never have happened and her continued input was not a small one. 

Of course she plays down her role in true humility. She is a beautiful soul.

I loved her quote "I was sickly and I decided that if I am only going to live half a life I will live it to the fullest." For her living it to the fullest was to become a nun.

Wonderful!

I left the film with a new appreciation of how God works in the lives of people to bring about the new kingdom and to build up the body of Christ. I think that through Sister Jacques-Marie Matisse died a good death. Sister also shows us what humility looks like.

In her obituary it ends with "When Sister Jacques Marie's role in the creation of one of the most important works of art in the 20th century was revealed by Barbara Freed in this documentary, A Model for Matisse: The Story of the Vence Chapel (2003), there were mischievous suggestions in the press that her relations with the artist had been more than merely platonic. "I never really noticed whether he was in love with me," she told an interviewer in 1992. "I was a little like his granddaughter or his muse, but he was always a perfect gentleman.""

Why I include that note is that a movie is now in the works, staring Al Pacino about Matisse and his relationship with  Monique Bourgeois (Sister Jacques-Marie). Maybe it's me but Hollywood does not do facts well and not since The Bells of Saint Mary's they certainly don't do agape love. I think they will go with the rumor and not the facts which will certainly be a shame. 

Maybe I'm wrong.

When forces of secular and religious fanaticism were locked in a no-quarter battle for the country's soul.

By now you have all seen The Avengers so I won't enter another over the top review. However I will mention that one of things I liked about the mechanics of this film was that there were no opening credits. I hate that part of any film more than i hate overtures. Both are a waste of time and are void of any artistic merit.

I was hoping that was going to become a trend and lo and behold I went to see For Greater Glory and....no opening credits.

Anyway go see For Greater Glory not just cause of the no opening credit thing but it really lives up to all the hype. Actually most movies claiming to be a "Christian" movie have been either lame or only slightly better than home movie quality. This film has the production quality we have grown used to.

Yes, the pace of this film is not the usual for a war movie, however it is perfectly suited the story. What I have found interesting is that those critics that have panned this film all have an anti-Christian bent using phrases like "martyr melodrama" or "Scene after scene is either a referendum on devotion or a display of brutality ". This film used faaaaar less blood than any modern war movie and how do you show a war without brutality?  If you remember the reviews of the Passion the most often used phrase against that film was "Little more than blood porn." Yet films like Saw are called edgy and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch was called "...a bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western." And Kill Bill was called fearless film making.

"Scenes on a referendum on devotion" -what the what - did these reviewers miss what this movie was about and why this civil war took place.

and as a side note it is still against the law, in Mexico, to hold a mass out of doors. 

Who dares attack my Chesterton an excellent article by Zac Alstin who comes out against another critic who gets it wrong.

Maybe its me but as I read the quotes from GKC, Zac mentions on the Prussians, I could not help but think of our current resident and his plans for Utopia through Tyranny...

“In other words, the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, has one notable defect—that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life from any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again from within. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nerves to give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has no premonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf and all its spies are blind.”