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| Winnipeg man arrested after attempting to stab Catholic priest during Mass |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-12-2025, 10:40 AM - Forum: Anti-Catholic Violence
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Winnipeg man arrested after attempting to stab Catholic priest during Mass
50-year-old Paweł Ołownia has been charged after attempting to stab a Catholic priest during Sunday mass at Holy Ghost Parish in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
![[Image: Pole-on-Pole-violence-e1739359425666-810x500.png]](https://www.lifesitenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Pole-on-Pole-violence-e1739359425666-810x500.png)
Screenshot/YouTube
Feb 11, 2025
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (LifeSiteNews) — A Winnipeg man has been charged after attempting to stab a Catholic priest during Sunday Mass.
According to a February 10, 2025, police report, 50-year-old Paweł Ołownia was arrested on Sunday night after attempting to stab Father Wojciech Stangel, OMI, during evening Mass at Holy Ghost Parish in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
“North District General Patrol officers attended and learned that a 50-year-old male suspect armed with a knife approached the altar during a service and advanced toward a 38-year-old pastor (victim),” the report said.
The incident occurred at Holy Ghost Parish, a Catholic church under the care of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Polish missionary group. Both attacker and victim are Polish.
Video footage of the incident shows Ołownia, dressed in a yellow coat, approach Stangel as he processed to the altar at the beginning of Mass. The priest was alerted by the organist, who broke off the entrance hymn to shout “Look out!” in Polish.
Ołownia chased the priest with a knife before apparently giving up. He then drove the point of the weapon into the altar and sat near the back of the sanctuary. An off-duty RCMP officer can be heard on footage of the incident telling the assailant seconds later that he is under arrest. He and another member of the congregation led Ołownia away.
READ: Priest attacked during healing service at Spokane cathedral, Bishop Daly present
“This was extremely unexpected. We don’t often hear of acts of violence occurring within places of worship in Winnipeg,” Winnipeg Police Service spokeswoman Const. Dani McKinnon told the Winnipeg Free Press.
“Police do not believe that the accused in this matter regularly attended the church or was part of the congregation, so it is more disturbing in that a motive hasn’t been established or may not until [the charges proceed to] court,” she continued.
Ołownia has been charged with assault with a weapon, possession of a weapon, and disturbing a meeting. He is currently being detained in custody. Police did not report any injuries from the attack.
The reason behind the assault remains unknown, and the parish has yet to put out a statement regarding the incident.
LifeSiteNews reached out to the parish but has not received a response by time of publication. However, it has been reported by the Winnipeg Free Press that Ołownia has a history of violence. According to the local paper, he was given 11 months of jail in July 2018 for assaulting a police officer. He was also “convicted of assault, theft under $5,000, and uttering threats in 2004,” for which he received probation, and has “impaired driving convictions.”
Last week, LifeSiteNews reported that a Catholic priest was attacked during healing service at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes in Spokane, Washington. As in this case, it was unclear what the attacker’s motive could be.
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| 1826: On the Agricultural Family, the Industrial Family, and the Right of Primogeniture |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-12-2025, 09:19 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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On the Agricultural Family, the Industrial Family, and the Right of Primogeniture
by Louis de Bonald
1826
Translated by Dr. Christopher Blum
![[Image: AgFam-Main.jpg]](https://hearthandfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/AgFam-Main.jpg)
"The Factory" by Camille Pissarro. Oil on canvas. 1873
Hearth and Field
Editor's Note: Louis de Bonald was born in 1754 to a noble Provencal family. He was a philosopher, politician, and counter-revolutionary who promoted theories of theocracy and traditionalism. He died in 1840.
This translation was originally published in Critics of the Enlightenment, 2nd edition, 2020, by Cluny Media of Providence, Rhode Island. The collection includes the above piece and five others, edited and translated by Christopher O. Blum. Dr. Blum is Academic Dean at The Augustine Institute. Hearth & Field is grateful to him for granting us permission to reprint this work.
* * *
When we see our liberal philosophers so exclusively preoccupied with commerce, industry, the progress of manufacturing, and the discoveries of the mechanical arts, we are led to admire the mutable nature of philosophical opinion. Thus Rousseau admires nature, and that only in its wild state. He would willingly take us back to eating our meat raw, wearing the skins of beasts, and sleeping in the shelter of trees or in a lair. In society he saw naught but servitude, weakness, crime, and misery. His complaints against it were all drawn from wild nature: the savage’s independence from men and human needs, his natural goodness, his bodily rigor.
But our hard Spartans have become effeminate Sybarites. The other philosophers speak only of the arts and industries that multiply our needs and pleasures, and they should like to see us all floating through life in palaces of gold and silk. Of frugality, temperance, and moderation of desires they no longer speak. For man in society, life is reduced to producing for consumption and consuming to produce. To them, society is divided into two classes: producers and consumers. The philosophers of recent centuries also bitterly and arrogantly denounce conquerors and their wars of conquest. Yet when they found these conquests profitable to their doctrines, they sounded trumpets to honor the conqueror, and in their philanthropy, benevolence, and humanity, they pardoned him for these appalling wars, whose success was secured by a profound disregard for a mankind pitilessly sacrificed to the extravagant dreams of ambition.
Today, these philosophers demand the independence of industry, the most dependent of all professions. They see commerce as the bond of peoples and the guarantee of peace in the world, even though the jealousies of commerce have been the subject of all our wars for some time, as they shall be for all those waged in the future. To commerce they attribute the spirit of liberty that has spread over Europe, although all the merchants, even the wealthiest of them, daily or even hourly shackle their personal liberty by pledging themselves as security for loans both large and small.
Today, some would confuse industry and agriculture and even place them in the same rank in society. Let us, however, distinguish them in their character and effects, and by their varying influences upon the mind and habits of men and the constitutions of states. This question is not foreign to the measure on primogeniture that has been submitted to the chambers, inasmuch as those who would establish or permit it for the land-owning family have never intended to extend it to the industrial family.
Agriculture feeds her children, but industry gives birth to children she cannot always feed. The child who comes into the world in an agricultural family finds his sustenance already assured, for the earth that his parents cultivate and that he will cultivate in his turn awaits him to give him his bread. The child born into an industrial family expects his sustenance from the salary he will earn if a master employs him, and if his industry is not stricken by events that could make it falter, or shut down, or prevent the sale of its products. The farmer lives from his produce even when he does not sell it. The industrial worker cannot live unless he sells what he produces. Thus, the agricultural family enjoys an existence independent of men and events, while the industrial family is dependent upon them both.
A farm is indeed a family whose head is the father. Whether he owns or rents the farm, he busies himself with the same labors as his servants and eats the same bread, often at the same table. The farm nourishes all its offspring. It has occupations for those of all ages and both sexes. Even the elderly, who cannot perform heavy labor, finish their careers as they began it and stay around the house watching the children and animals.
There is nothing like this in the industrial family, whose members work in isolation and often in different industries, and who do not know their master apart from the exigencies of his commands. Industry does not nourish all ages and both sexes. It does employ the child, and often so young that his health and strength are ruined. The child may receive some instruction, but he is abandoned in his advanced years when he can no longer work. Then the industrial worker has no bread except what he takes from his children’s salary or what he receives from public charity.
The farmer toils from the rising to the setting of the sun but never at night. He rests on Sunday and takes up his work again on Monday. The industrial worker works even at night in order to gain a higher salary, especially when he works at home by the piece. Whether he rests on Sunday or not, overheated by his forced labor, on Monday he debauches.
The farmer works outside and standing up. He strengthens his body by the hard and painful labor of the fields and exerts his intelligence upon the numerous details and variations in the culture of the earth, trees, and beasts. He tames the animals and forces rebellious nature to submit to his care. The industrial worker works hunched over and sedentary, turns a crank, makes the shuttle go to and fro, and pulls together the threads. He spends his life in cellars or attics and, becoming a machine himself, he exerts his fingers, but never his mind. Everything improves the intelligence of the farmer and lifts his thoughts towards him who gives fruitfulness to the earth, dispenses the seasons, and makes the fruit ripen. Everything debases the intelligence of the worker. He sees nothing above the master who employs him, or at best the inventor of the machine to which he is attached. We can thus say that the former waits for everything from God, and that the latter receives everything from man.
The farmer tells his neighbors of his discoveries and the new processes that he invents to improve his cultivation. The industrialist and the merchant keep their speculations secret. We can thus say that the agriculture that disperses men about the countryside unites them without bringing them together, while the commerce that crowds them into cities brings them together without uniting them.
The agricultural population is strong and vigorous, the industrial population frail and sickly. Not long ago a judge in a small canton in Switzerland bitterly deplored the degeneration of the beautiful people of his country since workshops and factories had been established in it.
Nor am I afraid to advance that there are nowhere more beggars than in manufacturing cities and industrial countries. England is the proof of this, for in spite of its immense fortune and widely extended industry, a large part of its inhabitants falls under the charge of the landholders. Their poor-laws are an oppressive tax. What does it matter that their poor are better clothed and better nourished than ours, if they are clothed and nourished only by public charity and parish offices?
If we are not careful, these poor laws will come to France under other forms and will spread and worsen in proportion to the progress of industry. Is this not a tax on the poor? The upkeep of the ever-increasing number of foundlings and orphans, detainees and convicts is paid by taxes and consequently by individuals. Those who study statistics could be easily convinced that these public poor, these poor of the state, some of whom require to be fed and all of whom need to be supported, kept, and watched, come in greater numbers from the workshops of industry than from the farms.
I do not speak of that local industry, or, if you will, the national industry, which is the companion of agriculture and puts the produce of the soil to work for the needs of those who cultivate it. This exists always and everywhere, for men have always built houses, spun flax and wool, forged arms and tools, and exercised all the arts necessary to human existence. I speak of that cosmopolitan industry that would furnish the entire world with products the primary materials of which it has scoured from the four corners of the earth. This frenetic industry causes our political leaders to consider foreign nations not as friends or allies, but only as customers.
Local industry serves agriculture, which demands its products by furnishing it the material and paying for them in the same fashion. The larger industry serves the whole earth, and the nation that produces the most for the foreigner is the one that most serves the nations who consume these products, and, consequently, it is the most dependent upon their needs or caprices.
Yet almost every country has the primary materials for those industries and arts necessary for human existence, and the taste for these arts is widespread, the workers easy to move, and a machine spins or makes its products just as well in Russia as it does in France or England. Therefore, it does not seem to be a wise or farsighted policy to depend overmuch upon foreign consumption for the prosperity of our country.
Necessities can be found and made everywhere, but superfluities can be kept out by governments.
Thus, by a singular contradiction, while all governments favor the progress of industries that provide for other states and try to extend their commercial relations beyond all bounds, these same states, through protective laws and armies of toll collectors, seek to limit the competition of foreign products with domestic ones. Everyone would sell and no one would buy. One may at least hope that the now-popular republican principles and sentiments will one day inspire us with the spirit of frugality, temperance, moderation, and economy, those virtues so strongly honored by the ancient republics. For they would be strange republics if they wished to begin as our monarchies ended, that is, in luxury. And another thing: in our monarchies, luxury was almost a duty of rank, whereas in our republics it will be only private and personal taste.
One may at least hope that the now-popular republican principles and sentiments will one day inspire us with the spirit of frugality, temperance, moderation, and economy, those virtues so strongly honored by the ancient republics.
It is amply proven that great profits are to be made by culling primary materials from the four corners of the earth, submitting them to labor at home, and then exporting the products to the whole world. The worker earns his keep, the captain his freight, the banker his commission, the state its entry and exit tolls, and so on. But let the state consider that large industry brings great expenses that are more political than fiscal: laziness, missed work, the sick and the aged left to the charge of public and private charity, the lack of instruction for the children of both sexes crowded into workshops, libertinism and intemperance that necessitate prisons and houses of detention and correction, the need to watch and police the armies of countrymen who flood into the manufacturing cities, and the need to prevent or punish those workshop revolts so alarmingly common in England and recently spreading to France. Then the state may discover that there is not so much profit after all in this large industry that makes the population grow boundlessly, and for which a precarious subsistence can only be procured by constantly extending the industry, and consequently further increasing the population. The agricultural population is limited by the extent and fertility of the soil it cultivates, but the industrial population is not. It produces without limit, until the failure of primary materials or the consumption of its products forces it to withdraw into itself and to close the workshops.
I return to the proposition with which I began this essay: agriculture feeds her children, but industry gives birth to children she cannot always feed.
In an agricultural region (or an entire kingdom) with only the industry required to make use of the products of the soil and the primary materials furnished by it, local industry would employ the agricultural population in excess of that needed for the cultivation of the earth. All those able to work would find work either in the fields or in industry. There would be a natural proportion between the two parts of the population occupied with one or the other set of tasks. There would be neither too much nor too little work, neither too few nor too many hands, and no one would suffer.
Yet should one suppose that large industrial establishments destined to produce for foreign lands were suddenly to arise, the population that furnished labor to the agriculture of the land and to local industry would no longer suffice. New modes of labor will demand a new population. It will form rapidly. A loom to make wool or linen cloth will be a dowry and tools a patrimony. The people will marry, build houses, and bear children. A village will become a town, a town a city. And to see such examples of rapid growth we need not leave France.
Thus, if the manufacture of cotton fabric formerly prohibited in France (when the government judged that the native materials of wool, linen, and silk sufficed to clothe us) today employs several thousand men, it is almost as if, when the time of prohibition was lifted, we had imported several thousand Indians into France. As these industries prosper, they create great private fortunes. This is what is today called the national wealth, although it is difficult to understand why we call wealthy a nation where alongside a few millionaires there are several million paupers who labor much, earn little, save nothing, live in the cabarets, and die in the hospitals. Such is the internal condition of the nations that we call rich, while in those thought to be poor because they have few large fortunes, as for example Sweden and Norway, there are, in proportion, fewer paupers than in France and in England.
Yet these large industrial establishments can come to ruin, either through the loss of primary materials, the importation of which can be thwarted by political circumstance or bad weather, or through the caprice of fashion, the tariff barriers of foreign states, the establishment elsewhere of a more advanced or successful industry of the same kind, or, finally, from the retirement or death of the industrious founder of the establishment. When this ruin comes, a flourishing city loses its population, men lose their jobs, and homes lose their inhabitants. We see many examples of this throughout Europe.
Let me not be accused of calling into question the utility, or rather the necessity, of industry. For it is to industry that we owe the use and enjoyment of all the goods that the Creator has put within man’s reach in order to support, to preserve, even to embellish his fleeting existence. Yet I warn governments of the danger an overextended industry poses to their tranquility when, in order to serve all its neighbors and even the most distant people, it gives birth to a larger population than religion can instruct or authority restrain, and sometimes even larger than industry can feed. These considerations are unnecessary in times of prosperity, when governments have nothing to do and sleep like a captain whose sails are filled with a favorable wind. They are for the reverses and the times of trial to which industry can be exposed when the hungry multitude demands tomorrow’s bread from a government whose supply ran out the day before.
Agriculture waits for everything from God and does not rebel against the author of nature if hail or frost ravages the crop. But industry, which waits for everything from man, blames everyone for its miseries: the masters, the rich, and the government. The government is forced to use stern measures to maintain public tranquility against these desperate men whose need carries them to every excess, and whose discontent is all too often heated up and set alight by malice. It is a deplorable situation when authority is forced to respond with rifle shots to the complaints of those miserable men who ask only to keep the career the government has forced upon them. In truth, a century of industrial prosperity does not make up for an hour of this terrible but necessary use of force.
This is, however, what has frequently been seen in England, and at this moment Liverpool and other manufacturing cities are soliciting loans from the government in order to feed one hundred fifty thousand unemployed and hungry workers. Here is a new danger for government: to accustom an idle population to live at the public expense.
Yet even in this respect the situation of France is more dangerous than that of England. The English remain a nomadic people, and the government can send its excess population to the colonies, foreign bureaus, mines, and enterprises that have made the whole globe a veritable tributary of England. Thus, in an astute policy, England favors the emigration of the rich, who disseminate the tastes and habits of their land without ever picking up the tastes and habits of other peoples. France does not have this resource, for she has no more colonies. And the Frenchman is more attached to his land. The government is unable to rid itself of an idle and disquieted population, and a boiling pot breaks if it cannot spill over.
Let it not be doubted that it is in hopes of one day taking this superabundant population into its pay that one party in Europe, promotes the exaggerated growth of industry and never finds enough of it, certain that it can give work to these idle arms, no matter how many, in the immense workshop of the revolutionary industry.
In this comparison of agriculture and industry, I kept until the end the final and most characteristic of their differences.
The farmer, forced to be moderate in his tastes, economizes in his purchases, and as all that he has is under the sun, cannot compromise the future of his creditors, who, by consulting the table of probabilities and by estimating the goods that they can see before their eyes, can judge with certitude to what point it is prudent to engage their funds in agricultural investments. But the industrialist and the merchant, for whom the active and the passive are equally unknown, and who today compete with the highest nobility in purchases and luxuries, only present to their creditors as a pledge of their credit bold and exaggerated speculations, whose ill success ruins the creditor and does not always ruin the debtor, who, even on the most unfortunate hypothesis, acquits himself with respect to his creditors with a balance sheet and a suicide. And who can know how many families have been ruined by the numerous failures that have of late broken out in all the commercial centers of Europe?
These reflections on agriculture and industry were suggested to me by an article in a journal of wide circulation that questions the practicality and utility of the measure—announced in the discourse of His Majesty at the opening of the session and since then proposed as a law—to reconstitute the landowning family and to forestall, if there is still time, the morcelization of landed property. Since then, the same journal, in the number for February 25th, has favorably reviewed a treatise On the Right of Primogeniture by the celebrated advocate Monsieur Dupin, who opposes the proposed law.
I will hazard several observations upon what I have read in the journal.
I dare say that on such a grave question we must not consult either the policies of lawyers or bankers. These two professions, by habit, interest, and duty, are exclusively occupied with private interests. But on this matter private interests and personal affections must be sacrificed to the general interest of society and to public affection.
The profound motives behind the proposed law cannot be appreciated in Paris, where a man takes his street to be a fatherland, an apartment let for three, six, or nine years to be a paternal house, and rents tallied in a ledger to be a patrimony.
Monsieur Dupin’s letter to his brothers, reported in the journal, is a masterpiece of fraternal tenderness and sensibility, and we are happy to find such touching expression in it during these wretched times when one hears only of domestic crimes, wives who poison their husbands, husbands who assassinate their wives, sons who destroy their fathers or brothers, and—a thing unknown and reserved for our day!—mothers, legitimate mothers, who destroy the children to whom they have given the light of day.
No doubt it is respectable, this sensibility of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who complain of the lot of their younger brothers, who are treated by the law with less favor than their elders.
Or who, at any rate, seem thus treated, for the eldest, attached to the soil by a larger share of the paternal inheritance, has the often-heavy charge of family affairs. Yet there is a more manly sentiment, that of the statesman for the lot of families without permanence and without a future, where the brothers only await the death of the father to leave their homes and begin a division that will leave them nothing in common but a ruinous legal proceeding in which their affections and, all too often, their patrimony will disappear.
It is absurd to ask whether the right of primogeniture be of divine or natural right. The law was not made for the eldest. In the eyes of God or nature, he is no greater than his cadets, even in royal families. The law exists for the preservation and permanence of the landowning family. Now the families that cultivate the earth that the Father of mankind has given them for their dwelling assuredly are of divine and natural right. So it is that the law of male heredity by primogeniture exists for the permanence of states. So it is that nature has by the same means and for the same ends established it in domestic society, just as it has in that public society of which the family is the element and type.
Let us then say that the right of primogeniture is but an abridged saying to express the first and sole means of the permanence of families, and it is true both that the right of primogeniture is not a right of the eldest and that the father may transfer the right of the firstborn to the youngest of his children.
In our age, individuals see nothing but individuals like themselves, particularly when everything in society has been individualized. The state does not and should not see man except in the family, because it only sees the family in the state. In the eyes of the state, there is no individual apart from a family.
The state does not and should not see man except in the family, because it only sees the family in the state. In the eyes of the state, there is no individual apart from a family.
Monsieur Dupin congratulates our new laws for having abolished free testaments and the right of primogeniture, the two great branches of our former legislation, because they were inexhaustible sources of long and expensive lawsuits. But I assure him that these two sources of lawsuits have been replaced, at least in agricultural lands, by a still more fertile and inexhaustible source of lawsuits: the equality of inheritance. I speak of suits for supplements to legitimate inheritance. There is a difference. Suits against testaments in general only took place in wealthy families, whereas suits for supplements to legitimate inheritance, a veritable gold mine for the lawyers and land brokers, ravage and ruin the smallest landowning families. For the cadets, who stubbornly believe that their father has given their elder secret advantages, and who no longer respect either their father’s will or their elder brother’s will overturn the house ten times and even dig up the cinders in the hearth to discover the few pennies kept out of the common inheritance.
What are we to say of the example of the Hebrews and the Romans adduced by our celebrated jurist? The monarchy of the Hebrews was not our monarchy, nor the Roman Republic our republic. “The ancients,” said Montesquieu, “did not have a tempered monarchy.” Thus, we can say that their monarchies were not as good as ours, while their democracies were perhaps better, at least they were better than the Convention, because nature wills that good institutions improve over time while bad ones become worse. Yet the Hebrews had the right of primogeniture: the law of Moses gave two shares of all the father’s wealth to the eldest. As Jacob lay dying, he called his eldest son Ruben his strength, the first of his gifts, the greatest in authority (see Gen 49:3). If a man had two wives, one beloved and the other hated, Moses did not allow the son of the cherished wife to be preferred to that of the odious wife if the latter were the eldest, and gave him two shares of all the goods, the share of the firstborn. While the Hebrews did not have the right of primogeniture as we understand it, they had something better for the preservation of family name and property, which is the only purpose of the right of primogeniture. In order to perpetuate the family name, the law commanded that the brother marry the widow of a brother who had died without issue (see Deut 25:5), and, to preserve property, it commanded that in the Jubilee year—that is, every fifty years—alienated goods return to the original families (see Lev 25:10).
These laws were effective in ways different from our own, nay, they were more able to preserve the family name and property. Monsieur Dupin thinks them harsh. Indeed, they were severe. These laws separated the Hebrews from foreigners in order to preserve them from contact with idolaters and to maintain their faith in the unity of God. Yet they were admirable for making a people of brothers, an indestructible people. They were, as Rousseau said, “proof against time, fortune, and conquerors.”
Whether or not the Romans had the right of primogeniture and the prerogative of the firstborn before Augustus, they valued the permanence of the family and the preservation of its goods. Their laws prevented the father from naming his wife or only daughter as heir for fear that she would take the goods to another family. In their lessons and tales, they spoke only of their ancestors. Their laws, customs, and manners were all based upon the ways of the fathers, whose images they preserved with great care and whose funeral rites they nobly decorated. Shall we say that this attachment to family was only seen in the patricians? Yet these were the only ones with names and properties to preserve. The people were clients of the great families and lived on the distributions of their government and the fruits of their conquests. Their tribunals only speak about the division of lands because they did not have any.
“When the Romans agree with me,” said Montesquieu, “I am confident.” Now then, these Romans, so great as a republic, so strong an aristocracy, our masters in legislation, gave immense power to the father of a family. To preserve the family property, they needed neither the Twelve Tables nor any other law, for the father’s power was already established. It was very conservative in another way, because he had absolute authority over his children, both during his life and after his death. This domestic monarchy was the corrective of political democracy during the republic’s best centuries, and when it was destroyed by the introduction of democracy into both family and state, Augustus attempted to reestablish it and instituted the right of primogeniture in families at the same time as he established monarchy in the state.
When the father had the right of life and death over his children, can it be believed that he lacked the power to regulate his succession and thereby insure the permanence of his family? We must cite the full passage from Montesquieu to oppose his authority to all those so-called natural laws about the equality of inheritance. “Natural law,” he says, “ordains that fathers feed their children, but it does not oblige him to make them his heirs. The division of wealth, laws about this division, and the procedure for inheritance can only be regulated by society, and, therefore, by political or civil laws.”
It seems to me that after the example of the Hebrews and the Romans, our elders in religion and our masters in legislation, after the constitutions of the legislators of the late Empire, Monsieur Dupin need not resort to the invasions of the barbarians in order to explain the establishment of the right of primogeniture in Europe. Yet some would see it as the result of the feudal laws, an origin which, it is held, would brand it as infamous. Yet Montesquieu was speaking of these barbarians when he said, “they established the best form of government that men could imagine.” So, if it is true that representative government was the ancient government of France, we owe it to these barbarians. “This beautiful government,” Montesquieu said, “was found in the woods.” And we may find it again in our salons.
In Tacitus’s sublime treatise on the customs of the Germans, we can see who were the true barbarians in the eyes of reason and a purely human philosophy: the refined and much-vaunted Greeks and Romans, or these people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin and had neither arts nor civilized luxuries, but who, in their native simplicity, retained the primitive conditions of the natural law that elsewhere had been disfigured by false policies. While it is true that Tacitus wished to satirize the customs of his day by opposing to them an embellished picture of the Germans, it only follows that this illustrious historian, better than any philosopher of his day, knew or divined the rules of laws and customs and the true principles of society. And Christianity, which had just arisen in the world, was not a stranger to this new direction of moral and political ideas.
I need not say that Monsieur Dupin disagrees with Montesquieu about feudal law. “But it was,” continues the jurist, “during almost five centuries, in a time of darkest ignorance and lowest barbarism, a time of private wars, highway robbery, and violence of all kinds, amidst these shadows and violence that feudal law was established.” He should have contented himself with saying the abuses of feudal rights, for it would be necessary to return to higher principles to find the origin and reason of the feudal bond, which takes its birth with the regulated monarchy in order to serve it feudally, that is, faithfully. Yet although Monsieur Dupin condemns the right of primogeniture by linking it to the feudal law and its deplorable origins, he does not fear that one may retort with his own argument used against him and say: “It was at the time of the Constituent Assembly and the Convention that the right of primogeniture was abolished together with so many other institutions, that is to say, in a time of the darkest ignorance of the principles of monarchical society, the most atrocious barbarism, the most outrageous impiety, not of private wars but of general wars bloodier than those seen by any Christian age, of thefts, not on the highways, but in homes, of the creation of forty or fifty thousand transitory laws, each more senseless than the last. It was in the time, finally, of the goddess Reason, the law of suspects, the code of émigrés, drownings, firing squads, exiles, deportations, the proscription of all talents, virtues, and fortunes, and when the only decoration of our public squares was an instrument of execution.”
The ignorance of the barbarians was that of infancy, but ours is an ignorance that comes from the vain sciences of which we are so proud and which make man neither better nor happier. Their violence was that of passion and youthful lack of reflection; their crimes were unpremeditated. Yet what expiations, what sacrifices attest to the remorse and repentance of the guilty! They left for the Holy Land, built pious foundations, and went far from the world and into the obscurity and silence of the cloisters to pour out tears for their faults and to edify the society they had scandalized. Our ignorance is that of a society grown old in corruption and led astray by false doctrines, and our violent actions were reflected upon and legalized by an execrable parody of all that is most holy and most sacred: justice. Repentance! God alone can see it. Men have seen less of it than regret, and for our expiation, we have thrown ourselves into the professions.
It is the enlightened jurist, the profound moralist, the sensible man, the orator accustomed to defending the sacred rights of misery and humanity and to invoke in their favor divine and human laws, it is Monsieur Dupin himself whom I ask whether, in considering the age and level of civilization to which our society has succeeded, the progress it has made in moral and legal science, the lessons it has received, the great examples of public and private virtue that have been given it, I ask him, I say, whether several years of the Convention were not a more shameful era for human reason than whole centuries of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. Consider the Hebrews, the Romans, the people of the North, that is to say, the people of God and the peoples of men, the peoples of art and of nature, the English, so often proposed for our admiration, the Germans, and the Spanish, who put even the tools of mechanical art into entail. I speak not of ourselves. Long ago we disavowed our own examples and repudiated our ancient wisdom. See how they agree on the great principle of the permanence of families and the preservation of their properties by institutions, by the right of primogeniture, entail, or other testaments. Let us examine at present this grave question with reference to fathers, children, property, and the state. One must lack all notion of the things of this world, of the ardent attachment that property inspires in the man who cultivates and nourishes it, and the habits to which it gives birth, in order to believe that the father of a family puts more interest in giving something more to his younger children than to preserving his house and transmitting to his descendants the property he received from his fathers and which he has spent his life cultivating, improving, and embellishing. It is not without a profound sadness and bitterness that he anticipates that the equality of inheritance will dissipate his work as soon as he dies and give his possessions into the hands of a stranger, a jealous neighbor, or even an enemy. A rich cultivator whom the author of this piece congratulated for the good state of his beautiful properties responded in a dolorous tone difficult to reproduce: “It is true, my property is beautiful and well cultivated. My fathers for several centuries and I for fifty years have worked to extend, to improve, and to embellish it. But you see my large family, and with their laws on inheritance, my children will one day be servants here where they were the masters.” Yet the father has a still stronger interest than that of his affections and habits, and this is especially true of the small landowners in France who are an important body within the state, even though they are neither electors nor eligible for the Assembly.
A rich cultivator whom the author of this piece congratulated for the good state of his beautiful properties responded . . . . "But you see my large family, and with their laws on inheritance, my children will one day be servants here where they were the masters.”
If in a small agricultural holding, the father must divide his wealth equally among his children, then no one of them has a reason to stay beside his parents to work without pay to improve an inheritance that his brothers will profit from as much as he will when his father dies. Therefore, as soon as the children are of age to work, they leave the family house to seek high salaries on other farms or in the workshops of industry. The parents, however, grow older, and soon old age or infirmity prevents them from cultivating their land. Then they sell it off piecemeal as their needs dictate, or they let it go to waste, and as soon as they die, the children come to divide what remains, sometimes cursing their father for having let their patrimony slip away, or, too often, suing one another over the inheritance. Their hearts remain even more divided than the fractured properties.
The disposable share of the inheritance does not entirely remedy this misery, because one of the brothers, generally the eldest, who by vanity or some other motive wants to keep the farm buildings, acquires a share of unproductive value at the expense of more useful properties. His is a property of ruinous upkeep, and it is even in part useless because the buildings, usually contiguous and indivisible, were constructed for a more considerable farm than what remains after the division. Soon the buildings will fall into ruin, the soil cover itself with shanties, the brothers sell their portion to neighbors, and the family will perish, not to return.
What becomes of the mother should she survive her spouse as the sole authority of the children? Widowed of her husband, widowed of her children, who, without a rallying point, each go to their own place, she watches them sell her marriage bed, the cradle in which she rocked her children, and the house for which she left her father’s home and where she thought she would end her days. She is left alone, without honor or dignity, abandoned by both the family to whom she gave the light of day and the family that received her.
And the younger children? Do they have as much to congratulate themselves for from the equality of inheritance as is believed? No doubt in some rich but small families the initial shares are large. Yet each child wants to have a family, and the land, first divided into a small number, divides itself anew into a larger one, and sooner or later the splitting proceeds geometrically. For small landowners, this evil is felt in the first generation. Each nevertheless stays attached to his small bit of property, tormenting and exhausting himself in order to eke out a wretched existence that he would have earned with less pain and more profit in another profession. He dies young, or, not being able to support himself and his children from his own property, he ravages his neighbor’s. One must live in a land where all the people are property-holders in order to gain the correct idea of the inconveniences and misery of these infinite divisions of landed livings.
The equality of inheritance has had another effect, a political effect of great consequence. It has caused voluntary service to fall off and has forced the government to establish and generalize conscription, a deplorable necessity that weighs on everyone and most especially on the poor, who have neither wealth nor affection other than their children. The liberals see this forced service as the obligatory accompaniment to and support for liberty. Where domestic affections were strongest, landowning families, even the less well off, made enormous sacrifices to protect their children from recruitment, and by tenderness, some also by vanity, or in order not to appear poorer than their neighbors, more often than not they gave as a replacement for a younger son him who had the right of primogeniture, and this cause of ruin has increased still more the fracturing of properties in the agricultural provinces.
A youth who would be better clothed, better fed, and better lodged in our army than at home, dreads the military service that in the past he would have embraced with ardor and alacrity, and more and more of those who in the past set the example for the people by accepting its risks now develop a distaste for this noble profession. Since then, civil employments and dignities, by the renown and importance of their functions, have taken pride of place in France away from the profession of arms.
I do not think that, in a continental state, one can view indifferently a change of spirit and manners that comes from republican opinions. The military spirit is the seedbed of all the virtues that defend and preserve societies: the willingness to risk one’s life that comes of courage, disinterestedness, generosity, and resignation to sacrifice. It was in the lands of agricultural and warlike people, like the Vendée, the small cantons of Switzerland, and Spain, that the Revolution found the most resistance. Never has an industrial and commercial people defended its land. Farmers beat ploughshares into arms. Workers will make wool and fabric even for the enemy.
The equality of inheritance strikes a mortal blow to property. Why should the landowner acquire and improve a property, that gives him so much trouble during his life and that must at his death disappear into imperceptible fractions and increase the patrimony of another family? Why should he attempt risky improvements that he might not complete and that no one after him will continue? Who will loan the necessary funds, at the risk of seeing himself thrown among several heirs? The children will no longer say what their father had said: “These are the trees my father planted, the fields he cleared, the well he excavated.” No monument to the labors and intelligence of their father will remain. Those touching reminders that gave birth to and inspired the desire to leave similar ones for his children will be erased, and the children will no longer know where their cradle rocked, nor where their father’s ashes lie.
The right of primogeniture in domestic society has the same effects as heredity in political society. And if the monarchy of the father kept the Roman Republic from pitching over the precipice to which democracy had led it, and was, with religion, the anchor that held the ship before the storm, what force of stability and preservation would it not give to the monarchical state, when the domestic power and the public power, the power of morals and that of laws, each constituted like the other, lend each other mutual support?
I have not spoken of one of the most palpable political inconveniences of the equality of division: the progressive diminution of the number of electors and eligible members. The liberal party does not seem to be touched by this, no doubt because it wishes to replace landowning electors with patent-holding electors. All they desire today is motion: motion of persons, fortunes, and the mind. It is the agitation of a fever that raises the humors and expends strength. But everything should tend to rest, for the force that preserves us is rest.
No doubt, as one journal said, “the earth is no more monarchical than democratic.” Who doubts this? Yet who can doubt that men take habits, sentiments, and their cast of mind from their different ways of life or constitutions of social existence? Thus, in the monarchical family the authority of the father passes after his death to the eldest of his children, without the peace among the brothers being troubled, for they see the heir as the support of their name, the representative of their father, and the last resource of their old age. This unites itself naturally to the monarchical government of the state, and the stability, regularity, tranquility, hope of permanence and preservation of government fits well with the weighty, uniform, and laborious habits of the life of the fields. At the same time, but as its contrary, industrial and commercial families with their acquisitiveness and taste for hazardous enterprises, eager for innovation and prospering in revolutions, accommodate themselves much better to the turbulence and mobility of republican governments. All one need do is glance at Europe to see where monarchical sentiments and where republican opinions are found.
The identity of constitution between domestic society and public society, and the harmony of their principles, is thus the most powerful means of strength and true prosperity for both, and it is because one party in Europe is persuaded of this truth that it sets itself to dissolving the family in order to arrive more promptly at the disorganization of the state.
Moreover, the proposed law can be nothing but optional. It leaves the father total liberty to make an equal division among his children, or, what leads to the same thing, to do nothing at all. In the south of France, in the land of Roman law, where families were more landed and more monarchical, everything that brings back the old habits and customs will be received with satisfaction, and at the beginning of the Revolution, the people of the countryside never seemed to me more alarmed than when the Constituent Assembly announced the law of absolute equality of inheritance. Should the proposed law be received less eagerly in the north of France, there will be no need to be astonished. The north was ruled by other customs. The people there were less landed and busier with industrial work.
The mobile fortunes of commerce and industry divide themselves by equal shares among children. These families are not, strictly speaking, political families, for they lack landed property. Landowning families are planted in the soil. The others only rest upon the soil and are ready to abandon it if they find a more fruitful industry elsewhere. Thus, the agricultural family is fixed. The industrial family is mobile, but it tends to fix itself and to pass from the purely civil state to the political state. For this reason, it is in the interest of the state, as it is that of families, that landed property concentrate itself and that mobile property divide itself, in order to leave to a greater number the means to obey their natural tendency and plant themselves in the soil. The contrary obtains today. Immense fortunes are made with capital, and the great fortunes of the land are dissolving. We spin with steam-driven machines that have the force of fifty horses, and soon we will no longer work the fields with the spade and hoe.
I have spoken of the principle of the right of primogeniture, and I have not busied myself with the consequences that the government has deduced from it in its proposed law in the Chamber. We must not forget that this is a proposed law, and that the Chamber could modify and extend it. There are laws on which it is fitting to leave to the Chamber a sort of initiative, in presenting them only with a principle, leaving to their wisdom the care of developing from it and applying its consequences, and I see that this one on the division of families is one of those laws.
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| FDA Lab Uncovers Excess DNA Contamination In COVID-19 Vaccines |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-12-2025, 07:49 AM - Forum: COVID Vaccines
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FDA Lab Uncovers Excess DNA Contamination In COVID-19 Vaccines
ZH | Feb 11, 2025
Authored by Maryanne Demasi via The Brownstone Institute,
An explosive new study conducted within the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) own laboratory has revealed excessively high levels of DNA contamination in Pfizer’s mRNA Covid-19 vaccine.
Tests conducted at the FDA’s White Oak Campus in Maryland found that residual DNA levels exceeded regulatory safety limits by 6 to 470 times.
The study was undertaken by student researchers under the supervision of FDA scientists. The vaccine vials were sourced from BEI Resources, a trusted supplier affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), previously headed by Anthony Fauci.
Recently published in the Journal of High School Science, the peer-reviewed study challenges years of dismissals by regulatory authorities, who had previously labelled concerns about excessive DNA contamination as baseless.
The FDA is expected to comment on the findings this week. However, the agency has yet to issue a public alert, recall the affected batches, or explain how vials exceeding safety standards were allowed to reach the market.
[Continued here.]
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| The Catholic Trumpet: Bishop Fellay’s 2013 Note: A Written Admission of Surrender |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-12-2025, 07:46 AM - Forum: The Catholic Trumpet
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Bishop Fellay’s 2013 Note: A Written Admission of Surrender
![[Image: rs=w:1280]](https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/df55e1a9-c854-4d0b-a2a9-94177954436c/IMG_5804.png/:/cr=t:0%25,l:0%25,w:100%25,h:100%25/rs=w:1280)
The Catholic Trumpet [slightly adapted and reformatted] | February 11, 2025
In 2012, Bishop Bernard Fellay submitted the infamous Doctrinal Declaration to Rome, a document that surrendered the SSPX to conciliar Rome—not in mere theory, but in action. Since then, SSPX leadership has attempted to dismiss its significance, claiming it was a mere “misunderstanding” or later “withdrawn.” However, a 2013 letter by Bishop Fellay—his own words, not speculation—confirms that this was no mistake. It was a calculated step toward conciliar recognition.
After our article, we have posted the Google-translated version of Bishop Fellay’s note, originally in French, from La Porte Latine – Note de Mgr Fellay sur la déclaration doctrinale du 15 avril 2012 (Mars 2013)
Key Revelations from Bishop Fellay’s 2013 Letter:
1. Rome threatened canonical sanctions for schism if the SSPX rejected their doctrinal preamble.
→ This confirms that the SSPX leadership knew they were being forced into submission under threat of excommunication.
2. The SSPX attempted to “soften” their resistance by offering a counter-proposal.
→ Fellay admits they proposed replacing Rome’s doctrinal preamble with the Tridentine Profession of Faith, adherence to Pastor Aeternus, and Lumen Gentium #25—interpreted in the “light of the pre-conciliar Magisterium.”
→ This means the SSPX was already negotiating its acceptance of Vatican II on Rome’s terms.
3. The Doctrinal Declaration was designed to refute accusations of schism—not to uphold Lefebvre’s resistance.
→ Fellay states that the April 15, 2012 document was meant to prove the SSPX still recognized Roman authority—confirming that it was an appeasement, not a defense of Tradition.
4. Fellay explicitly acknowledges that his own SSPX priests saw the Doctrinal Declaration as an ambiguity or even an acceptance of Vatican II’s “hermeneutic of continuity.”
→ His response? Rather than retract it, he attempted to clarify it for Rome—not for the faithful.
5. Rome rewrote the Doctrinal Declaration to demand even greater submission.
→ The June 13, 2012 version inserted direct recognition of the Novus Ordo Mass and sacraments, removed SSPX’s reservations about religious liberty, and mandated acceptance of Vatican II in light of Tradition.
→ Fellay’s reaction? He withdrew the April 15, 2012 text—not because it was an error, but because Rome was demanding even more than he was ready to give.
6. Fellay continued negotiations with Rome even after the July 2012 SSPX General Chapter set “preconditions” for an agreement.
→ He personally met with Bishop Di Noia in August 2012 to inform Rome that the April 2012 text had been “withdrawn” and that the SSPX would work with Rome on a different basis.
→ This proves that SSPX leadership never actually rejected conciliar recognition, but merely delayed it.
The SSPX Betrayal is an Ongoing Process
Many have argued that the SSPX’s betrayal was completed in 2012, but Bishop Fellay’s letter proves otherwise.
The formal recognition has yet to take place—but the doctrinal submission already has.
Rome never needed to declare an agreement publicly.
The SSPX leadership already surrendered when they compromised their doctrinal stance in exchange for a seat at the table.
The Marks of the Church Include Persecution
One of the marks of the Church is that it must be attacked. This betrayal is devastating, but it is not the end of the Church—it is the continuation of the Passion of Christ in His Mystical Body.
Our Lord promised that the gates of hell would not prevail.
Now, the choice is ours:
Will we follow Archbishop Lefebvre’s true resistance, or will we fall into silence and compromise?
The SSPX has already capitulated doctrinally—the only step left is formal recognition.
Date: March 2013
Author: +Bernard Fellay
Source: La Porte Latine – Note de Mgr Fellay sur la déclaration doctrinale du 15 avril 2012 (Mars 2013)
Translation Note: The English translation provided is a Google translation from the original French source.
The context is as follows: this Declaration comes on April 15, after Cardinal Levada's letter of March 16, in response to our letter of January 12. In his answer, Cardinal Levada expresses the refusal by the Roman authorities of our proposal to replace their doctrinal Preamble with the Tridentine Profession of Faith accompanied by the adherence to Pastor aeternus and to No. 25 of Lumen gentium understood in the light of the pre-conciliary Magisterium ("according to the anti-modernist oath"). Cardinal Levada adds that our rejection of the doctrinal preamble approved by Benedict XVI is equivalent to a break in communion with the Roman Pontiff, which leads to the canonical sanctions incurred for the schism.
From the beginning, what guides us in our relations with Rome is the principle of faith: without faith it is impossible to please God (cf. He. 11.6). We cannot accept that we are kidnapped, or even that we weaken our faith received at baptism. If we want to remain Catholic, it is this principle to which we must attach ourselves and on which we base all our action. Balancing this principle to obtain any practical advantage, even canonical recognition, has always been excluded.
Some have obviously not paid attention to the fact that I have always expressed that a practical agreement would never take place if the conditions sine qua non expressed by us several times, both in various positions and in the second response to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (January 12, 2011), which took up the very words of Bishop Lefebvre, were not realized. And that therefore, even if the April document had been approved, it would not have been enough for the conclusion of a canonical standardization. One of the capital points of these sine qua none conditions was and remains the free attack and denunciation of errors in the Church, including those from the Council.
At the delivery of his letter of March 16, Cardinal Levada made us understand that the Roman authorities believed that the Brotherhood had entirely rejected the magistery of all popes, as well as all the acts of the magistery, since 1962. Because according to him, we gave no value to these acts in fact, despite everything we could say. This accusation is false, and it was important to refute it, because as much as we accept to be unjustly condemned for our loyalty to the two-thousand-year tradition, so much we do not accept to be accused of a break with Rome, which our founder has always refused. It is indeed the ridge line that he has set for us, above the temptation of rallying to conciliar errors (what we have ruled out by the letter of January 12, and which did not escape Cardinal Levada), but also above the Sedevacantist temptation (what we have tried to do in this doctrinal declaration).
This context shows that the doctrinal declaration did not claim to be the exhaustive expression of our thought on the Council and the current magisterio. It did not replace our doctrinal position, as it was exposed during the two years of doctrinal interviews, it only wanted to complete them on a particular point: the accusation of schism. This is why this declaration tried to give examples of our submission to the magisterial authority in itself (in se), while maintaining our opposition to many acts currently posed by it (hic and nunc). To show our recognition of the Roman authority, regarding the conciliar reforms, we took up several points of the text of Bishop Lefebvre, in 1988, because we did not want to take up that of "doctrinal preamble" whose content we had rejected in our response of January 12, as Cardinal Levada had taken note in his letter of March 16.
Our position is certainly delicate, because we do not want to be heretic or schismatic, so we have proposed a text divided into two parts, the first setting out the general principles and totally and absolutely conditioning the second part which addressed the particular points of the Second Vatican Council and the main reforms that have resulted from it. To prevent any ambiguity in this second part - ambiguity that we had already denounced in our answer of January 12, 2012 (see Cor Unum No. 103, P.52 et sq.) -, it seemed sufficient to strongly recall that the magistery could in no way rely on itself or on the assistance of the Holy Spirit to be able to teach a novelty contrary to the constant magisterium of the Church.
The possibility of novelty or contradiction with previous teaching being excluded, by the very fact any ambiguity was ruled out as to our judgment on the Council, including the famous "hermeneutics of reform in continuity", unacceptable. With hindsight, we see that our thought has not been understood in this sense by several eminent members of the Fraternity, who have seen it as an ambiguity, even an ally to the thesis of the hermeneutics of continuity, which we have nevertheless always refused.
The Roman authorities, for their part, did not see in this declaration a rallying to the hermeneutics of continuity. That is why, after having established in a working document a precise comparative table of the divergences between their Preamble of September 14, 2011 and our declaration of April 15, 2012, they moved and modified the meaning of the additions that we had made and that we considered essential, then they added passages that we had deleted and that we considered unacceptable. This is the text that was given to us on June 13, 2012.
We can thus note among what has been moved and modified: at No. III - 6, where we recognized the validity of the NAME in itself and the legitimacy or legality of promulgation (as Bishop Lefebvre in 1988), we find in the text of June 13 the recognition of the validity and lawfulness of the NAME and the sacraments since Paul VI and John Paul II.
Among what has been added, we will note the multiple references to both the new catechism and the hermeneutics of continuity; thus in No. III - 5 what we had written about religious freedom: "whose formulation is difficult to reconcile with the previous doctrinal affirmations of the Magisterium" becomes: "whose formulation could seem to some difficult to reconcile...". At the same No. III - 5, the theological explanation of the expressions of the Council that do not seem compatible with the previous Magisterium of the Church becomes an explanation "in particular to help understand their continuity with the previous Magisterium of the Church", thus excluding any criticism.
After sending the texts of the General Chapter of last July to Rome, I met Bishop Di Noia on August 28, 2012, and I informed him that I had withdrawn our April proposal, which can no longer serve as a working basis. The doctrinal preamble of September 14, 2011 taken up in substance on June 13, 2012, and our double answer: the letters of November 30, 2011 and January 12, 2012 on the one hand; the declaration of the chapter of July 14, 2012 with the conditions required before any canonical recognition on the other hand.
+ Bernard Fellay - March 2013
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| Requiescat in pace: Dr. David Allen White |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-12-2025, 06:36 AM - Forum: Appeals for Prayer
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Requiem aeternam dona ei Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.
In your charity, please pray for the soul of Dr. David Allen White who passed away on February 11, 2025. Dr. White was a convert to Catholicism in 1979 while teaching at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. His influence there converted over thirty souls. He also lectured on literature at the SSPX seminary in Winona many times. At least one of his lectures remains available on the St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary bookstore website. A short biography: “Doc” White, as he is affectionately called by most who know him, was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in 1948, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1979. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1970, and his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin a year later. In 1981 he earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from Indiana University, where he also taught before moving on to the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. He then taught at Temple University, and later served – for 29 years – in the English Department at the United States Naval Academy, where he remains Professor Emeritus of English.
He is the editor of the Shakespeare encyclopedia Shakespeare A to Z and is the author of The Mouth of the Lion and The Horn of the Unicorn. Though technically retired, he is currently writing a biography of Bishop Richard Williamson. Dr. White, on behalf of and in conjunction with His Excellency Bishop Williamson, acts as the "public face" of the St. Marcel Initiative, handling much of its official correspondence and bearing responsibility for the release, as approved by the Bishop, of news and announcements regarding His Excellency's activities.
May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen.
✠ ✠ ✠
The De Profundis - Psalm 129
Out of the depths I have cried unto Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
If Thou, O Lord, shalt mark our iniquities: O Lord, who can abide it?
For with Thee there is mercy: and by reason of Thy law I have waited on Thee, O Lord.
My soul hath waited on His word: my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch even unto night: let Israel hope in the Lord.
For with the Lord there is mercy: and with Him is plenteous redemption.
And He shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord And let perpetual light shine upon him.
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| A Golden Treatise of Mental Prayer by St. Peter Alacantara |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-11-2025, 08:02 AM - Forum: Resources Online
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A GOLDEN TREATISE OF MENTAL PRAYER
WITH DIVERS SPIRITUAL RULES AND DIRECTIONS, NO LESS PROFITABLE, THAN NECESSARY,
FOR ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE.
FIRST COMPOSED BY THE VENERABLE AND BLESSED
FATHER FR. PETER DE ALCANTARA OF THE SERAPHICAL ORDER OF ST. FRANCIS,
Beatified the 18th of April, 1622.
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, BY GILES WILLOUGHBY.
TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, A BRIEF RELATION OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE SAME FATHER,
WRITTEN BY GILES WILLOUGHBY, OF THE SAME ORDER AND OBSERVANCE.
PHILADELPHIA:
PUBLISHED BY M. FITHIAN, 72 NORTH 2D STREET.
1844.
Taken from here.
THE PROLOGUE
Misericordias Domini in aaternum cantabo: "I will sing the mercies of our Lord for ever," [1] saith that kingly Prophet David. And not without cause ; for, so great and unspeakable are the mercy-works of the Almighty, which out of the bowels of his infinite goodness, he hath shewed to mankind, from the first instant of his creation, that the tongues of men and angels are never able to express them.
How wonderful was this benefit ; that creating man after his own [2] image and likeness,[3] he would have made him partaker of eternal felicity, and vested with his original justice? without death, or any passage by misery, would have associated him with the company of angels, if he had not, by his own default, violated the laws of his creator. Notwithstanding this act of malice, the divine clemency would not suffer the work of his powerful hands so to perish, but he, according to the diversity of times, always ordained opportune remedies, to reduce wandering man to the right way of his own salvation. Now manifesting his divine pleasure, by the means of angels, now sending the patriarchs replenished with his heavenly grace, who by their good example, might stir them up to piety; then sending the prophets illuminated with his holy spirit, not only to preach the present benefits exhibited to mankind, but also to foretell the future incarnation of the Son of God, with the mystery of his death and passion, by means of which, man should be loosed from the power of Satan, and eased of the heavy load of his transgressions.
Thus far hath that impenetrable abyss of the divine clemency sweetly disposed all things, requisite for the saving of the soul of man. But if we will extend our thoughts a little further, and call to mind the great benefits, still heaped upon man, after the ascension of our Blessed Saviour, we shall find them innumerable. Who is not astonished at the vocation of mankind, that the apostolical trumpet of a few men, sounding to human ears, the evangelical truth, through the whole world, shall rouse up souls, making themf happy, and thrice happy, to forsake all worldly vanities ? to betake themselves to a state of perfection; to sell all they have and give to the poor; to live in perpetual chastity, and simple obedience, to spend their days in rigorous penance, watching, fasting, and prayer, and finally to renounce all the seeming pleasures, for true there are none, which the flattering world could afford unto them.
These things are daily put in practice by many, who profess the gospel of Christ. For, where Catholic religion flourisheth, we see divers monasteries of men and women, filled with religious souls, who consecrate themselves a perpetual sacrifice to the Almighty.
How many religious do we see honored with priestly function, an office requiring more than human purity , and a burthen scarcely to be supported by angel's shoulders, executing their charge with great integrity of mind; careful of their own, and zealous of the saving of their neighbors' souls: who, by their holy doctrine and exemplary lives, preach to the Christian world a reformation; who spare no pains or tedious travels, to propagate the faith of Jesus Christ to heathens and infidels; who courageously labor in Almighty God's vineyard, exposing their lives for the name of Jesus. Indies, both east and west, are witnesses of their zealous and heroic spirits, there they sealed the truth of the gospel with the effusion of their sacred blood: yea, what acts memorable in the Church of God are there, wherein these men have not had a very great stroke? And, finally, they so well employ and multiply those talents which the great Commander of heaven and earth hath bestowed upon them here, that assuredly they may expect an eternal reward in the kingdom of heaven hereafter.
But that which is more admirable to see, a multitude of the weaker sex abandon all worldly pleasures, they who in the world might have swum in bravery, and have had all things at their own command, to inclose themselves in a retired cloister; there to spend their days in penance, and to consecrate the very flower of their springing youth a sweet-smelling sacrifice to their celestial spouse, Jesus Christ. These, truly, are those that fill and beautify the garden of paradise with lilies of purity: these are the flowers of our holy mother, the Catholic Church, which make her glorious and fruitful. These are they that make that happy change, a moment's fading pleasure for an immortal crown of glory.
Thus we see perpetual rivers streaming from the fountain of Almighty God's mercy. But let us descend a little further into his abundant charity, and take notice of his Fatherly providence, that in process of declining times, when the blood of our Redeemer hath often begun to wax cold in the hearts of men, he would not suffer it altogether to be extinguished, but according to variety of times, never ceased to repair his church, by the ministry of some elected servants, whom he sent into this world as second Apostles, who by their example and doctrine, might draw men out of the mire of their sins, renew the fervor of our Blessed Saviour's passion, and reduce collapsed discipline to her former rigor. Many hath he sent for this end, and amongst many this blessed saint, St. Peter de Alcantara, a man, from his very cradle, consecrated to evangelical perfection; he was a faithful laborer in our Lord's vineyard, with great fidelity performing his commanded task, as it will plainly appear by that which followeth in his life.
1. Psalm 88.
2. Gen. i.v. 26.
3. Magister Sent. lib. 2. dist. 20.
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| Opinion: The Trendy Peasant |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-10-2025, 11:45 AM - Forum: General Commentary
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The Trendy Peasant
Homesteading has become trendy, but the Catholic Land Movement has been advocating for it for decades.
![[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3...ipo=images]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.tEvjOgdNsnJAofOIKEI9QQHaGJ%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=92a2878e95fd0a82b9882455e07d1da764443acf13ef83ae5dded58e1f2be87c&ipo=images)
Julian Kwasniewski, Crisis Magazine | February 10, 2025
Trends are funny things. Often, they promote vapid novelties as “cool,” leading to flurries of popularity for ankle socks, ugly and immodest swimsuits, or particular meme rehashes. But sometimes trends are actually occupied with worthwhile things. The difference is that they tend to hide or rebrand the wholesome old things in a new light, hoping that no one will notice the trend’s lack of novelty. After all, if it isn’t new and weird, why bother?
A striking example of this is the homesteading or various “back to the land” movements, especially among Catholics. Admittedly not a “trend” to the full extent of the meaning of that word, which we might normally associate with social media fashion swings, it does seem like something everyone has recently become aware of and, in fact, is promoting, all the while hoping no one will notice that it’s what the trads, distributists, and Amish have been advocating all along.
A first indicator of the way homesteading has begun to “trend” is the multitude of journals and websites dedicated to Catholic or Christian homesteading that have recently sprung up. It seems like I come across a new one every few weeks. There’s the quarterly Hearth & Field (first print edition in 2024, although its website had been active before then), the monthly Homestead Living magazine (first issues in 2023), the Bruderhof-run quarterly Plough, and more established if less trendy publications like Grit, Small Farm Canada, and Acres. At the same time, I started noticing mainstream Catholic publications like OSV running articles on homesteading. And the National Catholic Register just ran a piece of mine about the Catholic Land Movement.
Crisis Magazine has already featured several pieces in this vein, but today I want to speak further about this Catholic Land Movement. I’ve mentioned it in passing before.
Key figures in the original movement were authors G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, along with a Dominican friar, Fr. Vincent McNabb. Inspired by Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (among other Church documents), these thinkers noted in the 1920s and ’30s how important a “means of production” is in acquiring wealth. With the Industrial Revolution uprooting the working class from the land and resettling them in factories, Leo XIII specifically taught that households have a right to productive property so as to provide for themselves.
Essentially, this means owning the “means of production” on a small scale. One of the slogans of the Catholic Land Movement was “Two acres and a Cow,” a reference to how every family ought to have enough land for a dairy cow. A supporter of the movement, Chesterton made a caricature of his rotund self and a cow with the same caption—perhaps we could call this a pre-internet meme!
Having means of production in the hands of every family “is essentially a bulwark against anti-Catholic ideologies such as Communism,” Andrew Ewell points out. Ewell is the co-director of the modern refounding of the original Catholic Land Movement, and I recently had the pleasure of speaking with him and Michael Thomas, the current director of the Catholic Land Movement.
Thomas states:
Quote:Today, another revolution unfolded and prompted the Catholic Land Movement’s revitalization. Like the Industrial Revolution, the medical and global technocracy apparent during Covid consolidated power. Like the response to the Industrial Revolution, this gave rise to a new populism and people returning to ideas of distributism…desiring healthy morality, theology, economics, and culture, and realizing the need for a practical expression of integrated living.
Belloc comments along this vein when he asserts that “If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.” The more slavery loomed large, the greater the desire for the freedom property brings.
Unsurprisingly, the movement has been growing rapidly for the past five years and hosts multiple regional conferences. With workshops on butchering, harvesting, and building, celebration of the Latin Mass and the Divine Office, and families enjoying fellowship, the conferences have been repeated every summer with increasing attendance—and increasing diocesan support. 2024 saw the participation of the local bishop of Albany. “We don’t take any public stance on the Liturgy,” Thomas says.
Quote:It’s not our focus or expertise, but many of us attend the Ancient Liturgy, and it’s just part of the phenomenon—not intentional, but just organically happening. We’re not an exclusive group, we invite and accept all valid liturgies, but what you will find at our conferences is that the Divine Office is in the Ancient Form, because the founders of the movement had that liturgy. As Pope Benedict said, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us, too.”
Already in love with the idea of Catholic homesteading, I wanted to speak to some of the regional leaders of the movement. One, Mark Mannerino, is the co-leader of the Western Pennsylvania & Eastern Ohio Chapter of the Catholic Land Movement.
“We live on a small plot in Eastern Ohio, and we push our 1.5 acres to the max,” he says.
Quote:We raise laying hens, big gardens, berries, a pig; and some meat chickens are coming this spring. Our goal is to eventually farm on a large tract of land in community with other Catholic Land Movement families. My wife and I have always preferred to be more self-sufficient and were regularly trying new ways to remove ourselves from the culture of consumption. We dreamt of a lifestyle for ourselves and our children where we could produce, not just consume; where we could embrace hard work and instill similar values in our kids, and where we could hold our Catholic faith at the center of it all. We thought that we were the only ones with this dream until we discovered CLM.
It sounds like a familiar story. Mannerino explains:
Quote:Our CLM chapter, and the revitalization of the movement in America, is in its infancy, but the momentum of its growth is astounding. The four tenets of the movement speak to our hearts and feed our souls; they satisfy the longing that so many people have had and represent, what feels to me, like a true calling from Our Lord.
These four tenets, or pillars, of the Catholic Land Movement are:
1.) the restoration of Catholic rural property through productive Catholic homesteads and rural communities;
2.) education and formation to help families form a true Catholic culture on their homesteads;
3.) fellowship and support between chapters, communities, and homesteading families; and, most importantly,
4.) the glorification of God.
Mannerino comments that
Quote:these pillars and this lifestyle satisfy one of the deepest and most fundamental desires of man, as they harken back to God’s first command to us in the Garden of Eden: Tend the garden, till the soil, be fruitful and multiply.
Another CLM member I spoke with was Chris Horan. He and his wife first heard about the CLM at Clear Creek Abbey. Fr. Francis Bethel, a biographer of John Senior, suggested Horan read Senior’s work. Senior’s The Restoration of Christian Culture led Horan down a path studded with rural realities—star gazing, barn dancing, wonder.
Unsurprisingly, Horan became an oblate of Clear Creek. “The Benedictine lifestyle mixed well with friends moving to land. It made me want to get out of the suburbs. There, we could have up to twelve chickens, but we were looking for more.” Horan eventually found a house with 62 acres outside of St. Louis, Missouri, and has now gone from three to thirty chickens. “Since then, we’ve raised them for meat and eggs. My parents moved in next to us and got milk goats. Then, we got piglets and raised them last year, everything from the butchering process…quite the experience!” This year their fruit orchard should be ready to produce for the first time. With four kids ranging in age from ten to two, the Horans are not just grateful that their kids have meaningful work to help with but that they are able to freely run out of the house into the beautiful outdoors.
The Horan’s and Mannerino’s stories are like that of many members. The Catholic Land Movement has a presence in nearly every state, with over 20 regional chapters in the United States. Anyone reading this article with an interest in finding out more should head over to the movement’s website and submit a contact form for information on the nearest chapter.
With the support of their local bishop, Ewell, Thomas, and other proponents of CLM were recently able to visit Rome and present their work to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. In another charming twist, the traddy homesteaders were welcomed to the Vatican and presented their vision, which met with support. They hope increasing Vatican recognition of their work will lead to a greater ability to work with dioceses to form chapters, hold workshops, and generally spread their resources among other Catholics longing for a similar way of life.
Like its members’ vegetables and fruit trees, it seems like the principles of the Catholic Land Movement are taking deep root—and are ready to weather rain or shine. As the Dominican Vincent McNabb put it a hundred years ago, in the first years of the original movement: “The natural defense of freedom is the home and the natural defense of the home is the homestead.”
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| The Beginning of Ambrosian Forelent |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-10-2025, 11:27 AM - Forum: The Liturgical Year
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The Beginning of Ambrosian Forelent
Gregory DiPippo, NLM | February 09, 2025
The Ambrosian season after Epiphany presents some interesting and unique characteristics compared with the same period in the Roman Rite. In the latter, from its first attestation in the Lectionary of Würzburg, the season has a full compliment of Gospel readings; in the Ambrosian Rite, on the other hand, the liturgical texts of the season were slow to evolve, but their evolution can be traced out from the surviving ancient manuscripts.
The traditional Roman rubrics are organized in such a way that none of the Sundays between Epiphany and Septuagesima are omitted; in the Tridentine reform, a system was created, and is still in use, by which those which cannot be celebrated in their regular place are moved to the end of the season after Pentecost. The Ambrosian Rite has no such tradition, with the exception of the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, which is never omitted, and always celebrated as the last Sunday before Septuagesima. (Prior to the Borromean reform of the Ambrosian liturgical books, this Sunday was called “the Fifth after Epiphany”, and there was no Sixth, since Easter very rarely occurs late enough for one to be necessary.) This custom is first attested in a liturgical ordo called the “Beroldus Novus” in the 13th century; its origin is to be found by tracing out the history of the period in Ambrosian liturgical books.
![[Image: Missale+Ambrosianum+1522.png]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxTiy-sJYcH7A2GyPqeQujrRPduyaNsgJQk_XHX6hVDYGC0T5vPXa9BtgcrYeyB81wEhkApvA_7CsomMO8uTiYum_cBCFHfaOaJFoV1mPoAHYKURfaIpACvtzHXg_mOdag9QRL/s400-rw/Missale+Ambrosianum+1522.png)
A page of an Ambrosian Missal printed in Milan in 1522, with the Mass of the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, preceded by the rubric that it is always celebrated “next to” (juxta) Septuagesima.
A codex kept in the Capitular Library of the basilica of St John the Baptist in Busto Arsizio contains a very ancient order of readings, one which certainly predates the Carolingian period, when the Ambrosian lectionary underwent a major reform. This codex has two different lists of Gospels, a “capitulary”, which is older, and gives only the incipits, and a later “evangeliary”, which gives the full texts. The differences between these two bear witness to two different phases in the evolution of the lectionary tradition. The capitulary has readings for only the first two Sundays after Epiphany, with no signs of any later corrections, while the evangeliary gives Gospel pericopes for the first four Sundays, with corrections added later in a Romanizing direction.
Neither list mentions a Fifth Sunday, which in most medieval missals was given as the last of the season, since the Sixth Sunday only very rarely occurs. The Ambrosian Rite borrowed the three Sundays of the Roman Forelent in at least two stages, and while both lists include the Sundays of Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, the capitulary does not include Septuagesima.
In the Ambrosian Missals of Bergamo (mid-9th century) and Biasca (end of the 9th century), which are fully in line with the Carolingian reform, the order of readings agrees with that of the “corrections” in the evangeliary of Busto. Furthermore, both of these have as the Gospel of the Fifth Sunday that which is now read on the Sixth, Matthew 17, 14-20. (As noted above, this will remain in place until the minor adjustment of the Borromean reform.)
“At that time: there came to the Lord Jesus a man falling down on his knees before him, saying: Lord, have pity on my son, for he is a lunatic, and suffereth much: for he falleth often into the fire, and often into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. Then Jesus answered and said: O unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked him, and the devil went out of him, and the child was cured from that hour. Then came the disciples to Jesus secretly, and said: Why could not we cast him out? Jesus said to them: Because of your unbelief. For, amen I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, Remove from hence hither, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you. But this kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting.”
![[Image: 02+exorcism.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7w6u5juRrhHC3XZp9ysmCTPDQmuCejizk-tDnLIqOgSK4Yc9-32uPY25oKIkatuG9PRgp05RZ76tcC5qGITjhZBH9JVF6IE_nT6BFn7nXc4FAQ_sufz1kcwqwXkgm4qnL69tv/s400-rw/02+exorcism.jpg)
The healing of the possessed boy; folio 166r of Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. Here it is used to illustrate the Gospel of the Third Sunday of Lent, Luke 11, 14-28, which begins with the expulsion of a devil from a mute, and in which Christ goes on to say “if I cast out devils by Beelzebub; by whom do your children cast them out? Therefore they shall be your judges. But if I by the finger of God cast out devils; doubtless the kingdom of God is come upon you.” (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)
The fact that this pericope is always found just before Forelent provides a useful clue as to its origin. Unlike the other Gospels of this season, it has no parallel at all in the Roman Rite, and therefore clearly does not derive from the Romanizing tendency attested by the corrections in the Busto manuscript. The admonition at the end to prayer and fasting gives it a clearly penitential character, which explains why it is always read as the introduction to Forelent, as the Church prepares itself for an intensified period of prayer and fasting.
The introduction of this final Sunday is further explained by a shrewd observation of the scholar Patrizia Carmassi regarding another lectionary, a codex in the Ambrosian Library (A 23 bis inf.) of the 13th century, but certainly copied from a much older archetype. This manuscript contains a list of the prophetic readings for the whole liturgical year, with a very significant correction for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany; the rubricated title “Dominica Quinta post Epiphaniam” is cancelled out and replaced with “Dominica in Septuagesima.” We may therefore suppose that the archetype did not include Septuagesima, but did have the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, a problem which the later copyist fixed simply by changing the title, treating it as an alternative for the older title.
In the Codex Mediolanensis, a Gospel book from the area of Milan with liturgical notes that date it to the 7th or 8th century, Septuagesima is still missing. Nevertheless, in the early Carolingian period, when the liturgical books of Milan were being revised and Romanized, the fourth and fifth Sundays after Epiphany were added. From this, we may deduce that these Sundays were seen as part of Forelent, along with Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, and the adoption of Septuagesima was therefore felt to be unnecessary. The custom of always reading Matthew 17, 14-20, on the Sunday before Septuagesima therefore reflects an ancient understanding of it as part of Forelent, regardless of what that Sunday is actually called.
There are some interesting parallels to the Ambrosian Gospel in other non-Roman western rites. In the oldest form of the Mozarabic lectionary, there is only one Sunday of Forelent, called “ante carnes tollendas – before taking away meat.” The Gospel of this Sunday, Matthew 17, 1-20, includes both the episode of Christ’s Transfiguration, and that of the possessed child read in the Ambrosian Rite. In two lectionaries of the ancient Gallican Rite, that of Luxeuil (6th century) and a fragmentary manuscript at Würzburg (7th century) the Gospel of the same Sunday, which is called “the Sunday after St Peter’s Chair”, is only the first part, Matthew 17, 1-9, which the Roman Rite reads on the Second Sunday of Lent, and the preceding Ember Saturday.
![[Image: 7+-+The+Transfiguration.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz5N1gy94APZgIvN3j0BLXwbfgAYMHV3p3TkeBp_tPMy2_U-cu1_j9xqOSEY72lSQKaW2wheqxxOi6mjSdHAh5ci6MeA7Msy1wmf9TclBz-bwIPOklyfF6VWJKl9rt1Rwf47Jw/s400-rw/7+-+The+Transfiguration.jpg)
The Transfiguration, by Raphael, 1517-19; in the lower part, the possessed child and his father are seen before the remaining nine Apostles.
In this episode, Moses and Elijah, who appear to either side of the Lord, represent the catechumens, since they both undertook a fast of 40 days in preparation for a vision of the Lord, as the catechumens do in Lent, to prepare themselves for the illumination of baptism at Easter. The antiquity of the association between this episode and the discipline of Lent is shown by a passage of St Ambrose’s commentary on the Song of Songs.
“Moses, set on the mountain for forty days, and receiving the Law, required no food for his body: Elijah, hastening to his rest, asked that his soul be taken from him: Peter, also on a mountain, looking upon the glory of the Lord’s resurrection, did not wish to come down, saying ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here.’ ”
This passage is ideally placed between the Baptism of Christ, celebrated on Epiphany, and His passion, as Ambrose explains in his book “On the Holy Spirit” (16, 755b).
“So that you may know that (God) made mention of the Lord Jesus’ descent (from heaven in the Incarnation), he further adds that he proclaimed his Anointed one unto men (Amos 4, 13); for at the Baptism, he proclaimed this, saying, ‘Thou are my most beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ (Matthew 3, 17). He proclaimed this on the mountain, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him. (Matthew 17, 17). He proclaimed this in His Passion, when the sun departed, and the seas and land trembled.”
The Mozarabic Rite, however, extends the Gospel of the Sunday “ante carnes tollendas” to include the episode of the possessed boy. This can be explained from a sermon of St Isidore of Seville, who compares the exorcism which Christ performed on the boy to the one performed as part of the rite of baptism.
“Exorcism is a word (or ‘speech’) of rebuke against an unclean spirit in regard to the possessed, but is also done for the catechumens, and by it, the most wicked power of the devil and his ancient malice, or his violent incursion, is expelled and put to flight. This is signified by that lunatic whom Jesus rebuked, and the demon went out from him. But the power of the devil is exorcized, and they are breathed upon, so that they may renounce him, and being delivered from the power of darkness, may be taken over to the kingdom of their Lord though the sacrament of Baptism.”
However, it still remains to be explained why the Gallican tradition includes only the episode of the Transfiguration, the Mozarabic that of the Transfiguration and the possessed boy, while the Ambrosian includes only the latter.
This article is mostly a translation of notes written by Nicola de’ Grandi.
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| Trump executive order creates task force to ‘eradicate anti-Christian bias’ in federal government |
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Posted by: Stone - 02-08-2025, 01:05 PM - Forum: General Commentary
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Trump executive order creates task force to ‘eradicate anti-Christian bias’ in federal government
Trump signed a new executive order on Thursday aimed at ‘eradicating anti-Christian bias’ and declaring that his administration ‘will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians.’
Feb 7, 2025
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday aimed at “eradicating anti-Christian” bias in government with a new task force to root out any remaining vestiges of the previous administration’s hostility to religion and faith-based values.
“My Administration will not tolerate anti-Christian weaponization of government or unlawful conduct targeting Christians,” the order reads. “The law protects the freedom of Americans and groups of Americans to practice their faith in peace, and my Administration will enforce the law and protect these freedoms. My Administration will ensure that any unlawful and improper conduct, policies, or practices that target Christians are identified, terminated, and rectified.”
To that end, it establishes a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose job will be to review all executive-branch agencies to “identify any unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct”; seek input from outside individuals and groups affected by such conduct, and make recommendations for administrative actions, rule changes, or new legislation.
Trump had announced plans for the task force earlier in the day, at the National Prayer Breakfast. “The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI, terrible, and other agencies,” he said.
The Biden administration exhibited a pattern of hostility toward Christianity, especially as it intersected with issues of life and sexuality. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade inspired a wave of threats and vandalism against churches and pregnancy centers, yet the perpetrators mostly went unpunished, with former Attorney General Merrick Garland citing the supposed difficulty of gathering evidence. By contrast, the administration aggressively prosecuted numerous peaceful pro-life advocates for violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
In early 2023, a leaked memo from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) claimed that what it called “Radical Traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology” was a potential motivator for “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” citing a report by far-left attack group Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The FBI retracted that memo, which Garland later disavowed as “appalling,” but that was far from the end of concerns about religious intolerance within the federal law enforcement bureaucracy. In summer 2023, the House Judiciary Committee obtained documents revealing that, contrary to previous assurance, multiple FBI field offices were involved in spying on Catholic communities.
In his first weeks back in the White House, Trump took several actions to begin reversing his predecessor’s handiwork, including pardons for the 23 pro-life FACE Act detainees, strict new limits on future FACE Act use, and ending the prosecution of a whistleblower who exposed child mutilation practices at a Texas hospital.
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