China

It has been far too long since I wrote, and it has not been for lack of topics, rather perhaps the exact opposite. There has been so much to write about that it has been difficult to know where to start.

Most of what has caught my attention has been Church scandals, but there have been some siginificant secular news as well. I shall make the unusual choice of starting with the secular news, although I shall only cover  the secular world in brief.  The rest will be taken up by Bergoglio's most headline-grabbing scandal to date, so perhaps it is just as well that my update-rate has been sub-optimal, for otherwise I would have been writing about that very thing all this time; so dominant has it been.

The most significant news was that China may scrap it's abhorrent two-child policy after 40 years of callous murders. What has often been called a one-child policy was for most people always a 2-child policy, since people outside the cities were 'allowed' 2 children, as were those without siblings. I write allowed in quotation marks because I cannot get over how absurd it is that the government sticks its nose into how many children  a couple has. A government can no more allow people to have more than 2 children than it can allow its citizens to breathe, which is to say that having children is a natural right which the government has no right to infringe upon more than it has on our right to breathe. It can only allow it only insofar as it has violated that right in the first place.

In any case, the 2-child policy created a childless society en large, which was not helped by the Chinese traditional preference for boys, or Chinas world-leading suicide rate among women. China is on course to have the oldest population in Asia in a few decades,  and all because of its communist ideologues. When you fight against nature, you will always lose.

I have, however, long maintained that China might indeed become the first country in modern times to outlaw the killing of unborn children, after having allowed and even mandated it. This is because the Chinese are not as ideological as their Western leftists. To them abortion was what they thought would bring them out of poverty. To the Westerners, abortion was a way to rebel against God and former Christendom's cultural and moral heritage, through the 'liberation' of women, which of course, has been the enslavement of women to their sexual appetites. The Chinese have no time for this nonsense; they are materialists. If killing hundreds of millions of children is what they think will bring them wealth, then kill hundreds of millions they shall. They have finally realised that children are not a cause of poverty, but rather a nation's greatest resource, and now they are despreate to increase the birthrate. The easiest and cheapest way is to simply outlaw the killing of children, and you can be sure that if they think that will help their bottom line, then it is exactly what they will do.

I recently read that the Chinese have spoken about introducing a tax on those who don't have children. In other words, my prediction is not far off from being realised.

A bridge collapsed killing at least 35 in Genoa, Italy. This collapse affected me more personally than most other tragedies since I am certain I drove over that very bridge last summer on my way to Florence. In other words, I could have been one of those people. The Italian government, with Salvini at the helm, blamed it on the EU, given it has forced Italy into budget cuts. I hope that was a statement brought out more by being overcome by emotions more than calculated political opportunism, because even by modern political discourse, that is stretching political truthiness beyond breaking point. I do like Salvini a lot, but that was well below the belt. There is much blame to go around, but the EU cannot be blamed for this.

The EU, to the extent it can even be blamed for forcing the Italians to attempt to live within their means, simply called for budget cuts. I am quite certain they never mandated that these cuts be on vital infrastructure. As one good piece pointed out, if Italy did not invest so much on the NATO racket, it might have had more to invest in its infrastructure. Instead of buying fighter jets costing hundreds of millions of euros, they could build very good bridges for much less than that, and save lives while doing it, instead of taking them.  Instead of going along with sanctions on Russia which could have brought billions which might have been used on infrastructure, they decided to go along with the American racket. They could have stood for their sovereignty in both cases. Instead they decided to put the money into the hands of the U.S. military-industrial complex, and the lives this and similar decisions took just ended up being their own.

Russia kept warning against a false-flag chemical-weapons attack in Syria, even providing evidence to the OPCW and the U.N.. The U.S., meanwhile, continued to protect its Syrian Islamists by making the militants know that any false or hoax flag conducted on them would lead to strikes on Syrian government positions, and being the lap dogs they are, the British and French followed suite. This comes as the Syrians and their Russian allies are preparing the final assault on the last major Islamist strong-hold in Syria, having cleared most of the country, despite American interference. The Netherlands, in turn, decided to end support for Syrian militant groups, which confirmed what we have been saying all along - that militants in Syria have been backed up by secular Western countries - in addition to Arab sheiks and Jewish zionists...

In a week which contained a lot of major news from the secular world, it might seem odd that my highlights are to do with an event that didn't even take this week - the Chartres pilgrimage. My primary concern is for the Church, for only the Church can save the world, and with that in mind I shall go on to address some of the events on the Chartes pilgrimage.

It is rather significant that the Chartres pilgrimage has become so famous. I had not even heard of it until som 4 years ago or so, but I shall have to agree with Michael Matt that it is one of the most significant events taking place in the Church today, although in his case he plainly states that it is the most significant, with which I do not quite agree. Along with its increasing profile, the mass has attracted higher profiles of celebrants. Last year it was Cardinal Raymond Burke, who is probably the closest thing we have right now to a champion of the faith. When Cardinal Burke celebrated though, it was without a position in the Curia, having been unceremoniously kicked out of his position as the head of the Apostolic Signatura (the Church's highest court) so that Bergoglio could railroad his full-throttled assault on marriage through easy annulments and sacreligious Communion.

This year's celebrant, therefore, would have to count as the most high-profile yet. In Cardinal Sarah, we had the head of the Congregation of Divine Worship, the man in charge of not only the Mass but the administration of all sacraments. Yes, there are bureaucratically speaking other higher-profiled cardinals - the secreatary of state comes to mind - and even with regards to Catholicity the prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith ranks higher. However, in his capacity as head of worship, he ranks second only to the pope, so one is entitled to say that they don't come much higher than Cardinal Sarah. Also in terms of standing up for the faith, Cardinal Sarah is one of only 2 cardinals under the age of 80 - the other being Cardinal Burke - who have consistently stood up against efforts to water down the faith, or to outright corrupt the faith (however tepidly).

It was therefore with great sadness that I read a piece written by Peter Kwasniewski titled Traditional Clergy: Please Stop Making “Pastoral Adaptations”. It quickly became clear that the piece was about the final High Mass at the Chartres pilgrimage, of which Cardinal Sarah had been the main celebrant. Among the 'pastoral adaptations' on show was reading both the Epistle and the Gospel in French, instead of Latin, and not bothering with having the proper orientations when reading Sacred Scripture, instead turning towards the people, and not even bothering to chant but rather speaking it out instead. These were grave liturgical abuses. It is unclear who was in charge of these abuses - the master of ceremony, the local bishop, or the cardinal are all potential agents. What cannot be denied, however, was that in perhaps the most prominent Tridentine Mass in the world today, we were being confronted with a very well-orchestrated Novusordoisation, and that ought to trouble us all.

If there is anything that the Novus Ordo has taught us, it is that slippery slopes are real, and once embarked upon one will quickly find oneself close to the bottom. It is therefore inexcusable that at the most prominent Tridentine Mass the celebrants would embark upon the same slippery slope which led us to where we are in NOChurch today, i.e., little if any reverence at Mass, with priests who treat the Mass as if it is their plaything, and laity who froth in anger at hearing that there are authentic Catholic alternatives. Another point that Dr. Kwasniewski made which is worth repeating is that Latin is the language of the Church, and the Chartres pilgrimage is the most international pilgrimage that we have today. It therefore makes little sense to have the readings in French when many of the attendees will be non-French. They could, if they so wished, read out in Latin according to the rubrics and then afterwards read in French (which is allowed by Ecclesia Dei, it turns out, although even that is a slippery slope) but that's not what they did. In other words, I am quite certain that whoever made the decision did it knowing full well that it was against the liturgical laws and against the spirit of the Tridentine Mass, yet did it anyway, perhaps to force the point that the Tridentine Mass has to get along with the Novus Ordo mass.

This being NOChurch times, of course, not everyone was upset. As I have previously mentioned, Catholics as a whole have lost the ability to get angry at anything directed against the faith. In "WHEREIN ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH GETS IT RIGHT AND FATHER Z DOESN'T " (I've no idea why he insists on capital letters for his headlines), a response to Fr. John Zuhlsdorf's Why we Say The Black and Do The Red, which was in turn a commentary on what Dr. Kwasniewski had wrriten , Fr. Allan McDonald chimed in that Cardinal Sarah was right to make adaptations in order to get people to feel at home, once again showing that the Novus Ordo has poisoned the minds of even many of those who say the Tridentine Mass occasionally. We don't adapt the Mass to ourselves; rather we adapt ourselves to the Mass, and the arguments he was making were well-adressed in Dr. Kwasniewski's original piece, which it seems blew completely over his head.

The best commentary on Fr. McDonald's piece came from Henry , who wrote:

A single instance of vernacular abuse, as at Chartres, is not a big deal. No doubt God will survive the desacralization of a couple of moments in this one Mass, and the

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