The major news this week were of course the 100th anniversary of The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima. Even I took the time to write down some thougths about this great and truly unique event.
Much was written about the Fatima anniversary, the best of which was by Roberto di Mattei on Rorate Caeli, in which he went through how 9 popes have failed to consecrate Russia ever since the Fatima apparitions.
In Poland they had a Rosary Crusade of sorts, although that particular Rosary Crusade was held in honour of the Feast of the Holy Rosary, some few days earlier. The Church in Poland encouraged the event and even senior of the governments got in on the act. It is very nice to see the Carholic faith flourishing in Poland, but I do fear that Catholicism in Poland has a nationalist strain to it which tends more to be a national marker than true discipleship. I hope I am wrong, because it would be terrible if the faith in Poland went the way of the faith in Ireland, where it seems more and more as though for the majority of the Catholics, the faith was something to mark them as not being loyal subjects of an occupying power. It's difficult to analyse the collapse post-Vatican II in any other way.
While it is always good to see Rosaries being prayed, there was a political aspect to the campain in Poland and that was the anti-immigration stance. The Rosary stations formed a perimeter around the whole country, in a symbolic gesture to the EU to leave Poland alone and stop forcing Islamisation upon it.
The aim of the Poles in wanting to protect their cultural, religious and even ethnic identity is very laudable and I very much support them in that. However, I cannot but point out that it is very hypocritical of the Poles to cry when their sovereignty is threatened while at the same time supporting the attacks on the sovereignty on others.
The truth is that Poland, according to polls, is the most pro-American country in the world. I do not have any direct memory of Poland's stance, but I would be extremely surprised, even shocked, if it was to turn out that Poland had been against any of the American misadventures in Muslim countries which have acted as the catalyst for what is commonly dubbed the "refugee crisis", a very misleading label, of course. The attacks that spring most to mind are those of Iraq, Libya and most recently Syria, although we should also remember Yemen and Afghanistan, from where many of the refugees who make it to Sweden hail, for some unkown reason.
It would be one thing if the Poles resisted for some other reason, but Poland resists, and I have to argue plays the victim card, precisely because its sovereignty was attached first by the Germans, then the Soviets and now lately the EU. Given that it is precisely soverignty, territorial and cultural integrity that the U.S. has been attacking the most, with Polands presumed backing if not encouragement, I would like to argue that the Poles have no recourse to the moral high ground in their stance against the EU. Nonetheless, I do stand with Poland on that particular issue, hypocritical as the country may be.
We had Trump repealing the contraceptive mandate, among others, from the Obama regime which came before him, something very much welcomed by all non-leftists. It is a bit of a scandal that it took so long. It was actually part of a series of administrative policies which the Trump administration took which were very encouraging. It was not all plain sailing though as they for some reason still continue to defend the homosexualisation, demoralisation and immoralisation of American society by insisting that homosexuals are a protected civil rights group as defined by the Civil Rights Act, in plain contradiction of the act. The U.S. bishops, as is par for the course, have been worse than worthless on this issue and many like it.
Staying on the topic of the U.S. and the aforementioned foreign aggressions, a very interesting piece was published on the Ron Paul Institute titled "US Violence Abroad Begets Violence at Home". A new study shows that the number of deaths caused by the U.S. since the Second World War, if I undrstand the piece properly. The number of countries the U.S. has attacked is staggering, and worth remembering is that not a single one of those nations actually attacked the U.S. or posed a threat to U.S. security - as if posing a threat was in any way a justification for attacking them, it must be noted. As I wrote on the day, we have become somewhat desensitised to American brutality: "It's what they do" thinks the world, and "It's what we do", Americans seem to think, but we owe it to the victims of this violence to remember them.
The context of his piece was the recent Las Vegas massacre, whose narrative, it must be admitted, grows all the more unbelievable.
We had an article by Jennifer Lahl on egg 'donation', written by a woman who had donated her eggs. She suffered adverse effects on which she had not counted and about which she had not been informed. It was a sad read, and one thing that struck me was how bad she felt at realising that the doctors saw her as nothing but a product to produce eggs, while of course, she was there in essence facilitating the treatment of children as products through IVF technologies. It just goes to show how much trouble a little abstract thinking can save us, especially when it comes to morality.
A week's summary would hardly be complete without a Bergoglio scandal, or a Bergoglio heresy, or not infrequently both. This time it is the death penalty, which Bergoglio says...
