Some good news out of Europe for a change - Sunday 26th of November to Saturday 2nd of December

Given the general somewhat-negative emphasis of this blog, I feel duty-bound to begin with some rare good news - Catholic or secular - coming out of Europe. These news come from Poland, perhaps not entirely surprisingly.

I have my misgivings about the apparent re-Catholicisation of Poland, being generally wary of the nationalistic bend it seems to have. Anyone who knows me will know that I support nationalists in all their stripes, so long as they don't bring with them baggage of ethnic or racial ideologies. I can't claim that I have seen much of that in Poland, but I am still suspicious that the modest but noteworthy increase in Catholic social life in Poland has more to do with the Poles trying to craft out a national identity. In this  context, turning to Catholicism works very well since it unites a large chunk of Poles - presumably even German Poles - given that it is not on purely ethnic lines, and they can be unified in Catholic grandeur, which built all that is good about Europe. It also manages to differentiate Poland from its secularist/atheist enemies to the West and North - primarily Germany and the Nordic countries -  and it's long-time Orthodox adversaries - in the form of Russia - to the East. It also allows them to keep out Muslims on the culture card, without getting into issues of Islam itself.

Credit where credit is due though, and the news that Poland was going to phase out Sunday trade by the year 2020 was some of the best news that I have heard or read in a very long time. It is something which wreaks of a true religious revival - which whatever the intentions from the political class - might actually end up being long-lasting, regardless of who comes to or stays in power in the country. Naturally the leftists, or so I have been informed, were opposed to it, but it would seem as though the cultural marxist's general treachery to the Polish people will not be soon forgotten and it would seem as though the Law and Justice party or some similar nationalistic entity in Poland will be there for a while.

Furthermore, it is politically difficult to get rid of Sunday as a day of rest given that I am pretty sure that the Sunday rest was abolished by the communists, and one does not make many friends in Poland by making oneself a defender of Soviet policies. It's a very shrewd political move, and I applaud it unhesitatingly.

Sticking to Europe, we have more proof of its downfall in a handful of stories. In Germany and other places they have started decorating their 'diversity barriers', wrapping them up as Christmas presents. That's the most appropriate term for the barriers that they have put up on pedestrian walkways and roads leading to Christmas markets. Since we all know why they have to be put up in the first place, it would be much more honest to just paint a picture of Mohammed on them rather than pretend that they are part of the Christmas attire. I should point out that the town centre close to where I live has also put up diversity barriers - presumably to protect its Christmas market -, but alas has not gone to the trouble of wrapping up.

We were also informed that the Muslim population in Europe is set to grow, up to 25% of the population in some places, by the year 2050, and that is with zero immigration.

The Muslims do the right thing in having children, and that is to be applauded. It is the West which is to be chided for deriding the miracle of procreation. That snobbery may well prove to be its downfall, and it will be just reward for its open-armed embrace of the culture of death.

In the U.K. there was a feminist march, and feminists did what they do best which is to display their stupidity and entitlement. One of them even took the trouble to inform people that the Bible is more violent than the Koran. She should know, she told us, being a former Catholic herself. It has featured as one of my day's comments, but I'll reproduce 2 very poignant parts of the analysis from Tantumblogo. The first one clearly lays the blame for the woman's ignorance for the Novus Ordo, and I naturally agree:

“I’ve read passages [of the Koran] and the Bible is a lot more violent.  I should know, I’m a former Catholic.”  Another triumph for the post-conciliar Church!

The second one was his take on feminism itself, and feminists in general:

Which brings me to my final point – I will probably offend some in saying this, or how I say this, but I have long had a sense that many feminists are really little more than out of control teenage daughters who keep acting more and more outrageously in the increasingly forlorn hope that “dad” – society, males at large, whatever – will rein them in.  And the longer they are allowed to continue acting out, the more hurt and upset and, subsequently radicalized, they become.  It’s like they are a toddler constantly trying to find some boundary that daddy will set for them.  In their rage in finding none in the collectively weak Western men of the past 60 years, they will even turn to the cruel, draconian authoritarianism of islam to find some entity that seems to care about them enough to tell them no, to set firm limits, and make them turn over the dang car keys.

It is difficult to disagree with that either. As I wrote in my comment to the bizarreness of the whole spectacle:

I am also at a loss to understand what these women are marching for, given that the laws in most formerly Christian countries can hardly favour women more. The only way they would favour women more than men would be if they did something akin to the U.S. in slavery or segregation times - what it did to blacks - and deemed men as something akin to an inferior class of human beings officially.

This is a good opportunity to write that, unlike Bergoglio, I generally dislike self-quotation. However, I didn't want to formulate a new statement and the comments on my day's comments piece are worth looking at, as was the article.

In Norway, a woman was let off the hook for not wanting to have any part in abortifacients or abortions. The case regards a Polish woman who was working as a doctor in Norway and was fired because she refused to take part in these immoral practices, and the accommodation which she had received was rescinded after a while. I put this as bad news and not good news since it is a travesty of justice that the case had to go to the highest court for this woman to receive anything akin to justice.

Across the other side of the pond, Donald Trump had a speech in which he commemorated putting up of the White House Christmas tree. He used the word "Christmas" many times, and even said "Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ", something you suspect Bergoglio would never do were he speaking outside of an officially-mandated liturgical ceremony. I am still not convinced that Trump is a Christian as he seems very unprincipled, and I always get the impression he mentions God or Christianity more because he knows it will annoy his enemies - and the enemies of common good - than because he believes in it himself.

What pleased me most is that he didn't use the occasion to pander to non-Christians and did not use the idiotic Judaeo-Christian term. That term, in the event it servers any good whatsoever, only serves the purpose of telling us who is gullible/an idiot/politically correct. There is no justification whatsoever for the use of that term in any context. It is a term from the 1940s, from what I have ascertained, and is neither historical nor theological and in fact is both anti-historical and anti-theological.

In other Trump-related news, Pat Buchanan wonders what good Trump thinks will come of the U.S.-assisted starvation blockade on Yemen spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.

We were also informed that a new book titled "The Dictator Pope" is about to hit the stands in Italy. I hope to devote more time to this topic in the future, but suffice to say, unless it tells us that Bergoglio walks around the Domus Sancta Martae with his robe open, it's hard to think that the book will paint him in much worse light than Bergoglio's very public and very numerous scandals do, because somehow I doubt the author has any insight into Bergoglio's inner perversion ring.

On the topic of Bergoglio, the ecologist in chief decided to fly all the way to East Asia for nobody-knows-what. This time he landed in Myanmar and Bangladesh. With his usual timidity, he did not mention the issue of the Rohingya Muslims while in Myanmar, but only when he was in Bangladesh. The point that Bergoglio is ultimately a coward has been made by others and I shall not belabour it. Suffice to say that for someone who does little else than berating others for not doing things he wants, it looks even worse when he fails to address an ongoing humanitarian crisis in the country of his visitation. Now, there are obviously prudent reasons why a pope might want to avoid that, but the fact of the matter is that Bergoglio grandstands about everything, so for him to cower on this point just proves what a hypocrite he is. Neither do I believe in the statements released afterwards which claimed that he had brought up the issue in private with the Myanmarese leaders.

I know too little of the issue to have a decent opinion on the rights and wrongs of what is going on, and I limit my analysis to Bergoglio's hypocrisy.

In Syria, the U.S. has lost but they seem to be doing everything to not bring themselves to that understanding. The Russians say that ISIS has been defeated but the U.S. claims it has not so the Russians have concluded - very rightly so - that the U.S. is only using the pretext of chaos to establish a permanent military occupation of Syria.

In the National Geographic we were informed that the age of the Holy Sepulchre has been scientifically determined to be what tradition holds it to be. No decent person was surprised.

FInally, the neo-Catholics at EWTN miss the point, yet again. There was a segment on the close relationships between Bergoglio and some of the Orthodox patriarchs and EWTN intimated that this might bring Catholic-Orthodox relations together. It's not surprising that they can be so blind given that they are Novus Ordites.

I hasten to point out that the patriarch of Moscow probably has more respect for the Ayatollah of Iran than he does for Bergoglio, a man who enjoys going out of his way to be photographed with trannies and assorted sodomites, not to mention, washing the feet of all and sundry, and that is when he is not busy wrecking what little orthodoxy is left in the Church and suppressing the somewhat vibrant - doctrinally and numbers-wise - communities of the Church.

The Orthodox have a huge distaste for novelty and even more for irreverence, and Bergoglio seems to specialise in both. He has, if anything, set back Catholic-Orthodox relations quite far back.