In this episode, Trent Horn responds to Joe Rogan’s interview with linguist Daniel Everett and the claim that ancient religious history is unreliable simply because we weren’t there to see it. Trent explains why this objection misunderstands history, applies a double standard to Christianity, and wrongly treats modern “immediate experience” as the only reliable way to know truth.
23 October 2026
A Carlist View on Portugal’s Monarchist Front
"A king without the spiritual order of Christendom is just a secular totalitarian." "Fundamentally, a Monarchist project must start with the conversion of souls within a mystical realm."
From One Peter Five
By Eric Aaron Castro
A king without the spiritual order of Christendom is just a secular totalitarian.
To the attention of Francisco Araújo, Frente Monárquica.
A Carlist Perspective on Portugal’s Grand Assembly of the Monarchist Front[1]
Being that we are one, Holy, universal Apostolic Church, we are spiritually interconnected. What one does reverberates across to all of us. So, I have heard your words. Now, please, hear mine.
To start, I would like to define what I understand Carlism to be, in order to provide the proper background for the perspective from which I am approaching this public discourse with you.
One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila[2]
In short, Carlism, a sister cause to Portugal’s Miguelism, is an ongoing counter-revolutionary effort to restore of the temporal expression of Christendom and of legitimate authority in the political order across all the Spains, that is, throughout Hispanidad. Carlism is the act towards the restoration of the history and political and philosophical tradition of Hispanic Catholicism through the eyes of the genuine Spanish identity inherited from Christianity from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. This restoration is manifested in completion through the throne of Monarchy.
So know that I address you as a brother in arms. Even though Miguelism remains dormant, the future Monarchy of Portugal will run congruent to the development of other Christian kingdoms.
What you are attempting is, in many respects, a step in the direction of recovering a public Christian mind. But much of your language remains conceptualized within a Liberal framework. This is a serious problem for any counter-revolutionary effort given that we are facing the throes of post-modernity: five hundred years of the Revolution (Protestant/Masonic/Liberal). So, it is critical to be conscious of how we use our concepts and terms to exercise politics. If we work within the frames of the enemies of the Church, Catholics don’t convert the Liberal order, the Liberal order converts us. We need not turn to language outside of Tradition. Speaking from my experience, it is kind of a spiritual work where we can rejoice when we uncover layers of Liberalism within ourselves. The de-Liberalizing process is an ongoing process because we are all children of the Revolution.
So, here are some points for consideration:
Monarchy is not an Ideology
Monarchy is not an ideology. It is a political orientation toward the natural order of society and toward legitimate authority.
For this reason, I am not convinced that the prefix “neo-“ is necessary. The Christian truth that political society ought to recognize the Kingship of Christ and order itself toward His Social Reign is not something that becomes obsolete and requires a modernized version. The circumstances of its application may change; its truth itself does not. The counter-revolutionary task is not about inventing something novel and new but to recover what has been obscured.
To that end, I would remove terms such as Nationalism from the vocabulary of this endeavor.
Nationalism is fundamentally alien to the universal political imagination of Christendom. It belongs to the fragmentation of Christian Europe that followed the Reformation, the rise of territorialism from the German princes, and eventually the Enlightenment sovereign nation-state.
Nationalism operates on a presumption of ethnic demarcation. It is a race-based classification.
Demographic pressure makes people brutish.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
The Church is universal. The Liberal order is sectarian in thought. There should therefore be no “identity-based vision” in our rhetoric. The Ancient Greeks, of course, had a profound understanding of culture in terms of homonoia (Ὁμόνοια); harmonizing style to various forms of life; the ordering of a microcosm of communities toward a shared good, without erasing the distinctions among its constituent parts. Conversely, the political order of Christendom must be judged by its capacity to align the orientation of diverse societies – societies with their own unique idiosyncrasies – to reflect the Gospels within the universal order of the Catholic Church.
Dehellenizing Christianity turns it into a sect.
– Nicolas Gomez Davila
Part of our work entails each of us reclaiming the mentality of the Ancien Régime. It will be hard.
Catholics stand in the throes of postmodernity, the result of five hundred years of Protestantism and two hundred years of Anglo-Protestant Liberalism. We endured across Protestantism, Anglo-Protestant Liberalism, Enlightenment rationalism, Mercantilism, Darwinian evolutionary theory, Empiricism and data-driven governance, Financial capitalism, and the Ethics of monetary control.
There should be no compromise with Liberalism, its left/right dialectics and its syllabus of errors. Total warfare seeks structural transformation; it represents an occurrence in which a system of political organization is redesigned through a new metaphysical order. Our rhetoric does not simply offer an alternative lens; it dismantles the frame altogether. And that is precisely what is needed. Our task, then, is to reorient the public mind toward a clearer, more compelling future.
So, we must reject these postmodern ideas that are divorced from our faith: marketization, consumerism, branding, celebrity culture, competition, individualism, self-responsibility and self-entrepreneurship, mobility, new strategies of ‘Othering,’ and English as a neo-Liberal skill.
So, whether we are talking about politician Donald Trump, celebrity Taylor Swift, self-help guru Jordan Peterson, Jesuit in Name Only James Martin, social media personality Andrew Tate, or far right figure Nick Fuentes, these are all Liberals in their public statements. They all operate within, and cannot fully escape, the Liberal paradigm. They all adhere to the same neo-Liberalizing logic.
We, Catholics, must stand on our own league… beyond ideological thinking.
Our Task is not for Progress
I would be cautious about importing the language of contemporary business administration (CRM metrics, optimization, growth metrics, and similar concepts) into the internal evaluation of a Monarchist movement. Such language belongs to the mentality of neo-Liberal positivism. It risks reducing a spiritual mission to the organizational logic of acquiring market share.
The question is not simply: How efficiently are we growing? The deeper question is: What kind of Christian men are we forming, and toward what order are we orienting them?
Furthermore, Tradition is not a collection of formulas. Tradition is a transcendental society.
Everything in the Middle Ages—from a Romanesque church or a feudal relationship to a Gothic Calvary or a pilgrim from Cantuaris—is robust, sensual, and concrete. Because medieval man perceived transcendence as a perceptible attribute of the object.[3]
The future Catholicism will not be built by optimization but a restoration of Platonic Realism.
Fundamentally, a Monarchist project must start with the conversion of souls within a mystical realm. The king is the last step in this societal transformation as an integral centralizing figure. Now, a king without the structure and spiritual order of Christendom is just a secular totalitarian.
With Liberal progress, comes an integration of optimism. My advice for you is to start not with “optimism,” but with hope.
Optimists never question the social structures in which things are placed and which determine their course. They are irremediably subject to their own social system without even realizing it and are therefore incapable of fundamental criticism. Today, we do not need optimism, but radical hope in something new, hope in a completely different way of living that arises from criticism, awareness, and the will to change. Unlike optimism, which lacks nothing and is not in motion, hope is a movement of searching, an attempt to orient oneself. It pushes toward the unknown, the unfamiliar, the open, going beyond what exists today. It moves toward the unborn, toward the new.
– Byung Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope[4]
Our Policy is Oriented Toward the City of God
St. Augustine tells us that history is ultimately the story of two cities: the City of God and the City of Man. This is the tension between Bablyon vs Jerusalem. In this tension, we have to be clear. We need to draw the line and distinguish for the people.
People need practical case studies of parallel structures they can turn to in defense of the City of God. So, you have to be able to verbally articulate the structure of Monarchy in a way that audiences can visualize and understand. In my opinion, you require the ability to think of the order of political hierarchy that Carlists so well define in their quad mantra: Dios, Patria, Fueros y Rey.[5]
- God (Dios) represents the ultimate end of political life: the recognition that all human authority participates in and remains subordinate to the eternal law of God.
- Fatherland (Patria) represents the historical community received through generations, whose customs, language, faith, and institutions form the conditions through which persons pursue the common good.
- Local Rights (Fueros) embodies the principle of subsidiarity and the natural rights of intermediate communities, preserving the legitimate autonomy of families, municipalities, regions, and historic societies against excessive centralization.
- King (Rey) represents legitimate authority ordered not toward domination, but toward the stewardship, guardianship of this order.
At its deepest level, however, this is not merely a political program. A Christendom ordered toward the temporal representation of the Social Reign of Christ is a mystical kingdom. It is an interconnected mystical body ordered under Christ and within His one Church, His Mystical Body. The political order is therefore not an autonomous mechanism imposed upon society from above as some design problem; it is the manifestation of a higher spirituality from the faithful. This is where the power of the laity is represented in subsidiarity and integralism. Where our enemies demonstrate their power from the top down, our power as Catholics is bottom up.
The Problem is Spiritual Before it is Political
Portugal must recognize that its government is an external proxy for foreign interests. As Charles Coulombe says: there is the country and then there is the real, deep, country underneath – the mystical body of the Church.[6] The laity, the practicing Catholics, are the real country. However, we must accept that we are today “pusillus grex,” little flocks of Christians left in our own homelands which are governed by tyrannies. We cannot rely on the anti-Christian state. The distinction between the real, deep, country and legal country is the same distinction between a parasite and its host. Our priority focuses on the health of the Christian body-politic.
As you mentioned in your speech: Portugal needs to be a small state before it gets bigger. Yes!
So, the problem is not a secular political one: it is a spiritual one. It is not a design problem but a faith problem. Every political era is first defined by a theological era. Therefore, before we speak about acquiring political power, we need, as Carlist David David Fernández says, the maturation of the pre-political form of the modern Catholic.[7] Why? In a confessional state, Christians are not merely citizens who happen to share a religious belief. We are united as members of one mystical body. Where one of us falls into sin, the whole body suffers; where one rises in virtue, the whole body is strengthened. A kingdom, properly understood, is therefore more organic and more mystical than the modern nation-state. We are all married together in unification. (Hence why.. everyone in your congress is, in some way, related by blood to Afonso Henriques). This is more Platonic Realism. This is the hierarchy of forms: first there is the Social Reign of Christ. From that higher reality proceeds its temporal expression in legitimate authority—the King—and from the King authority is diffused organically through the different layers of the kingdom: aristocracy, municipalities, intermediary institutions, guilds, families, fueros, and the land itself.
Envision, Now, New, Future Christian Societies
Finally, we have to recover the universal and creative character of Catholicism. Our past is a rich source of principles, examples, and memory; it is not a blueprint that we are required to reproduce mechanically. Our future will necessarily be different from our past. There are no formulas in this game.
The Portuguese of old themselves understood this.
Camões captured this same spirit when he wrote:
| Cesse tudo o que a Musa antiga canta, | Cease all, that the ancient Muse sang |
| Que outro valor mais alto se alevanta. | A higher form of Valour rises.[8] |
The Portuguese, along with the traditional Jesuits, were able to envision a different future. They created new Christian societies across the Americas, Africa and Asia with Goya, India, Macau, China and Timor-Leste Indonesia; each with their own languages, customs, artistic expressions, laws, institutions, and local identities while integrating them into the universal Catholic order.
This is precisely what Catholicism means. Catholicism is not about spreading language or ethnicity, it’s about creating a society that with its own idiosyncrasies reflect the Gospel.
Part of being hopeful is also being open to these new possibilities because hope goes beyond what currently exists. It affirms the ability to build the future.
Thank you.
With a firm handshake,
Eric Aaron Castro
[1] “Neomonarquismo (Discurso) Assembleia Magna da Frente Monárquica,” YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To9YXUO4ZXg.
[2] These and the following quotes are taken from Escolios a un texto implícito.
[3] Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1977).
[4] Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024).
[5] “El Tradicionalista,” El Tradicionalista (April 3, 1889), https://www.ermua.eus/sites/default/files/repositorio-archivos/13_03041889_O_29_09_2016_9_46_09.pdf
[6] Charles Coulombe, “Beyond Nihilism: Rebuilding Christian Culture,” YouTube video, 33:25, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeUPNG_4F-g&t=2005s].
[7] David Fernández, Navarrese Carlist, personal communication with the author (August 15, 2026).
[8] Camões Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas, Canto I, stanza 3 (the lines “Cesse tudo o que a Musa antiga canta, / Que outro valor mais alto se alevanta”). Text: Camões Digital, https://camoesdigital.pt/genero/epopeia-os-lusiadas/.
St Raphael, Archangel
From Dom Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year:
The approach of the great solemnity, which will soon be shedding upon us all the splendors of heaven, seems to inspire the Church with a profound recollection. Except for the homage she must needs pay, on their own date, to the glorious Apostles Simon and Jude, only a few Feasts of simple rite break the silence of these last days of October. Our souls must be in conformity with the dispositions of our common Mother. It will not, however, be out of keeping to give a thought to the great Archangel, honored today by many particular churches.
The ministry fulfilled in our regard by the heavenly spirits is admirably set forth in the graceful scenes depicted in the history of Tobias. Rehearsing the good services of the guide and friend, whom he still called his brother Azarias, the younger Tobias said to his father: Father, what wages shall we give him? or what can be worthy of his benefits? He conducted me and brought me safe again, he received the money of Gabelus, he caused me to have my wife, and he chased from her the evil spirit, he gave joy to her parents, myself he delivered from being devoured by the fish, thee also he hath made to see the light of heaven, and we are filled with all good things through him. (Tobit 12:2-3)
And when father and son endeavored, after the fashion of men, to return thanks to him who had rendered them such good service, the Angel discovered himself to them, in order to refer their gratitude to their supreme Benefactor. Bless ye the God of heaven, give glory to him in the sight of all that live, because he hath shewn his mercy to you … When thou didst pray with tears, and didst bury the dead … I offered thy prayer to the Lord. And because wast acceptable to God, it was necessary that temptation should prove thee. And now the Lord hath sent me to heal thee, and to deliver Sara thy son’s wife from the devil. For I am the Angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord … Peace be to you, fear not; … bless ye him and sing praises to him. (Tobit 12:6-18)
We too will celebrate the blessings of heaven. For as surely as Tobias beheld with his bodily eyes the Archangel Raphael, we know by faith that the Angel of the Lord accompanies us from the cradle to the tomb. Let us have the same trustful confidence in him. Then, along the path of life, more beset with perils than the road to the country of the Medes, we shall be in perfect safety; all that happens to us will be for the best, because prepared by our Lord; and as though we were already in heaven, our Angel will cause us to shed blessings upon all around us.
We will borrow from the Ambrosian Breviary a hymn in honor of the bright Archangel.
HYMN
O Raphael, divinely sent guide, graciously receive the hymn we suppliants address to thee with joyful voice.
Make straight for us the way of salvation, and forward our steps: lest at any time we wander astray, and turn from the path to heaven.
Look down upon us from on high; reflect into our souls the splendor shining from above, from the holy Father of lights.
Give perfect health to the sick, dispel the darkness of the blind: and while driving away diseases of the body, give spiritual strength to our souls.
Thou who standest before the Sovereign Judge, plead for the pardon of our crimes: and as a trusty advocate appease the avenging wrath of the Most High.
Renewer of the great battle, crush our proud enemy: against the rebel spirits give us strength, and increase our grace.
To God the Father be glory, and to his only Son, together with the Paraclete Spirit, now and for evermore.
Amen.
St Raphael the Archangel — God’s Healing Messenger | Lessons from the Book of Tobias
A sermon for today. Please remember to say 3 Hail Marys for the Priest.
St Magloire of Dol, Bishop & Confessor
From St Peter's Anglican Church, Sark, Bailiwick of Guernsey, Duchy of Normandy
I think it’s quite likely that those of us who haven’t lived on Sark all our lives had probably never heard of St Magloire until we came here. And for all of us, I suspect that our knowledge is quite scanty, so I thought St Magloire’s day would be a good opportunity for us to try to get to know a little more about our Island Saint.
Right from the beginning, there is doubt about his place of birth, some accounts giving it as Vannes in Brittany, and others stating he was a Welshman of South Glamorgan.
However we do know that he was born in the early 500s, that his mother was a Welsh Princess, his father a Breton nobleman, and that from the age of 5 he studied at the monastery at Llantwit Major under the tutelage of St Illtud.
Some sources say that he was the cousin of St Sampson and others that he was the nephew of King Arthur.
After his ordination he was made Abbot of a monastery at Lammeur in Brittany and we’re told he governed there with prudence and holiness for 52 years.
At that time his cousin, St Sampson was Bishop of Dol, and when Sampson died, Magloire was elected to replace hm. Despite his hesitation based on his sentiments of unworthiness and incapacity, he accepted, although he was already nearing his seventies.
He remained there for only 2 or 3 years, and then after receiving instructions from a visiting angel, he resigned his post and in 565 withdrew to Sark where he established a community of 62 monks.
Sark became an important centre of Christian learning as pupils were sent from Northern France to be educated on the Island, and it is believed that as many as 600 pupils passed through the monastery during those years.
It’s interesting to note that 2 of them were St Guénault who became the patron saint of Alderney and Tugual who settled on Herm.
Several miracles are attributed to St Magloire and as a result of these, he acquired much land. He had been given the entire Island of Jersey by the Seigneur Count Lois Escon who had been gravely ill and was miraculously cured by Magloire. Then Nivo, the owner of Guernsey asked for his help in curing his daughter who was deaf and dumb, and for this Magloire was granted a third of Guernsey. He was also given half the Island of Sark by Loyesco of Brittany in return for curing his leprosy.
One of the most well known stories about him concerns his rescue of a group of children who were playing on the beach below the monks water mill in an abandoned wreck, when a sudden violent storm swept them out to sea. Hearing their cries for help, Magloire is said to have transported himself out to sea and saved them and their small boat, steering it to the safety of a Breton cove before vanishing.
The children were taken by local fishermen to King Judal, who, believing their story, ordered the boat to be filled with corn, flour, wool and other gifts before putting to sea again. The boat carrying the children found its way back to Sark in 3 days.
Magloire was also reputed to be an adept slayer of dragons, and it is said that he saved Jersey from a “monstrous reptile” by his actions. The community became so self-sufficient in food that when famine hit Northern France in 586 supplies were sent from the estates in Jersey and Guernsey to feed the starving in Brittany, and many refugees including members of the Breton nobility were accepted onto Sark.
We don’t know exactly when St Magloire died, dates varying from 575 – 617. However we do know that he spent his final months in his cell reciting Psalm 27 and it’s said that a visiting angel gave him the last rites, October 24th being designated as his feast day.
St Magloire felt called to come to Sark and set up a community. The main buildings are believed to have been in the area where the Moinerie Hotel now stands. They built a sluice at what is now L’Ecluse and had fish ponds and a water mill, the bay below still known as Port du Moulin.
The community needed to be self-sufficient, as well as coping with visitors, and at this they were so successful they were able to send supplies to the starving continent as well as caring for refugees.
To do this Magloire needed to understand Sark and to appreciate all the things it could supply, fish from the sea and the ponds, cereals for flour and bread, vegetables, and good clean air.
The Island provided solitude, and an inspiring place to study and became an active centre of the Christian faith.
To put St Magloire’s time on Sark briefly into context, St Patrick had died in Ireland 100 years before in 465 and throughout the 500s St David had spent his life as a missionary in Wales founding many monasteries, and dying as a very old man in 601.
Columba had left Ireland in 562 to found the famous monastery on Iona just 3 years before Magloire came to Sark. Columba died in 597, the same year that Pope Gregory sent Augustine to convert the English, and it was almost another 100 years before Aidan went from Iona to Lindisfarne.
So it’s true to say that St Magloire and his monastery on Sark was right at the centre of all missionary activities that were being carried out by the Celtic Saints during those years, and whilst we may not be able to claim quite the status of islands such as Iona or Lindisfarne, there are many who do see Sark as a Holy Island, and we can be very proud of our pioneering early resident, St Magloire, and of Sark’s place in the Christian world.
St Raphael, Archangel
From the Catholic Encyclopedia
The name of this archangel (Raphael = "God has healed") does not appear in the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the Septuagint only in the Book of Tobias. Here he first appears disguised in human form as the travelling companion of the younger Tobias, calling himself "Azarias the son of the great Ananias". The story of the adventurous journey during which the protective influence of the angel is shown in many ways including the binding "in the desert of upper Egypt" of the demon who had previously slain seven husbands of Sara, daughter of Raguel, is picturesquely related in Tobit 5-11, to which the reader is referred. After the return and the healing of the blindness of the elder Tobias, Azarias makes himself known as "the angel Raphael, one of the seven, who stand before the Lord" (Tob., xii, 15. Cf. Apoc., viii, 2). Of these seven "archangels" which appear in the angelology of post-Exilic Judaism, only three, Gabriel, Michael and Raphael, are mentioned in the canonical Scriptures. The others, according to the Book of Enoch (cf. xxi) are Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, and Jerahmeel, while from other apocryphal sources we get the variant names Izidkiel, Hanael, and Kepharel instead of the last three in the other list.
Regarding the functions attributed to Raphael we have little more than his declaration to Tobias (Tobit 12) that when the latter was occupied in his works of mercy and charity, he (Raphael) offered his prayer to the Lord, that he was sent by the Lord to heal him of his blindness and to deliver Sara, his son's wife, from the devil. The Jewish category of the archangels is recognized in the New Testament (I Thess., iv, 15; Jude, 9), but only Gabriel and Michael are mentioned by name. Many commentators, however, identify Raphael with the "angel of the Lord" mentioned in John 5. This conjecture is base both on the significance of the name and on the healing role attributed to Raphael in the Book of Tobias. The Church assigns the feast of St. Raphael to 24 October. The hymns of the Office recall the healing power of the archangel and his victory over the demon. The lessons of the first Nocturn and the Antiphons of the entire Office are taken from the Book of Tobias, and the lessons of the second and third Nocturns from the works of St. Augustine, viz. for the second Nocturn a sermon on Tobias (sermon I on the fifteenth Sunday), and for the third, a homily on the opening verse of John, v. The Epistle of the Mass is taken from the twelfth chapter of Tobias, and the Gospel from John 5:1-4, referring to the pool called Probatica, where the multitude of the infirm lay awaiting the moving of the water, for "an angel of the Lord descended at certain times into the pond; and the water was moved.And he that went down first into the pond after the motion of the water was made whole of whatsoever infirmity he lay under". Thus the conjecture of the commentators referred to above is confirmed by the official Liturgy of the Church.
Vigouroux, Dict. de la Bible, s. v. Raphael.
Collect of St Magloire of Dol, Bishop & Confessor ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast (See Note)
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
R. And let my cry come unto thee.
Let us pray.
O Lord, we beseech Thee, hear the prayers which we offer Thee on the solemnity of Blessed Magloire, Thy Bishop & Confessor and by the interceding merits of him who worthily attained to serve Thee, absolve us from all our sins.
Let us pray.
O Lord, we beseech Thee, hear the prayers which we offer Thee on the solemnity of Blessed Magloire, Thy Bishop & Confessor and by the interceding merits of him who worthily attained to serve Thee, absolve us from all our sins.
Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
R. Amen.
Collect of St Raphael, Archangel ~ Indulgenced on the Saint's Feast
According to the Apostolic Penitentiary, a partial indulgence is granted to those who, on the feast of any Saint, recite in his honour the oration of the Missal or any other approved by legitimate Authority.
V. O Lord, hear my prayer.
R. And let my cry come unto thee.
Let us pray.
O God, Who didst give Thy blessed Archangel Raphael unto Thy servant Tobias to be his fellow wayfarer, grant unto us, Thy servants, that the same may ever keep and shield us, help and defend us.
Let us pray.
O God, Who didst give Thy blessed Archangel Raphael unto Thy servant Tobias to be his fellow wayfarer, grant unto us, Thy servants, that the same may ever keep and shield us, help and defend us.
Through Jesus Christ, Thy Son our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.
R. Amen.
Traditionalists, the Last Pariahs – Never Before: Traditional Pilgrims Blocked From Entering Saint Peter’s
Everyone is welcome in the Synodal Church: protestants, Orthodox, atheists, and adulterers, but NEVER Traditionalists! That would be a step too far for the heretics.
From Rorate Cæli
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Traditional Catholic Pilgrims (mind you, plain diocesan priests and faithful) have been banned from entering Saint Peter's Basilica during this weekend's Summorum Pontificum Pilgrimage.
The move was announced to Christian Marquant (of Paix Liturgique), during the liturgical conference that precedes the pilgrimage every year.
From our friends at Messa in Latino:
Christian Marquant: "The Pope Denied Us Saint Peter's, Believing the Mass Was Instrumentalized Last Year"
Reported by Enrico
Messa in Latino, October 23, 2026
*The President of the Association Paix Liturgique, who has devoted his life to the defense of the Mass of all ages, concluded our meeting with direct, clear, and incisive words.*
---
...
Turning to an examination of the ecclesial situation, the speaker observed that it is deeply sorrowful to be ignored by the hierarchy of the Church — ignored in the literal sense: they do not know who we are or what we do. They know nothing beyond the Society of Saint Pius X, and even that they know very poorly.
Consider the following: in 1976, a survey by IFOP — an official polling organization — certified that fifty percent of French Catholics, both practicing and non-practicing, said the Church had gone too far with its reforms, and that approximately twenty-five percent agreed with Lefebvre, who had ordained priests without authorization. The bishops' reaction: none.
In 2001 — before Benedict XVI — twenty-five percent of French Catholics said they would have liked to attend the traditional liturgy. Only ten percent were opposed, the rest indifferent.
After the *motu proprio*, the same surveys, conducted across several countries, showed that approximately one third of Catholics would have wished to attend the ancient Mass, and among the remainder, an absolute majority was not opposed to liberalization.
And yet the official Church has never acknowledged this aspiration of the faithful.
Meanwhile, in France, over the course of fifty years, practicing Catholics as a proportion of the total population have fallen from fifty percent to four percent — reckoning those who attend Mass at least once a month — and to two percent for those who attend every Sunday. The faithful have voted with their feet. The official Church does not seem to care.
Why not explain these things to the Pope? An attempt was made, through Bishop Schneider, who obtained an audience last December. In the course of that meeting, when the Mass at Saint Peter's the previous year came up, Pope Leo remarked: "That Mass was instrumentalized." What did he mean? Perhaps he was displeased by the large attendance, or even more so by the prominent coverage it received in the press.
And indeed, this year the Mass at Saint Peter's was denied.
More than that — and this is the very latest news — not only the Mass, but even access to the Basilica itself has been forbidden to us, and this without so much as the appearance of a pretext, which in any case would have been unconvincing.
We shall see tomorrow what transpires.
This year, few senior prelates are in attendance at our conference. The wind has not been favorable in recent months, and they can tell which way it is blowing. There are few bishops with the courage of an Athanasius or a Hilary of Poitiers.
But we laypeople are certainly not intimidated. We have seen far worse moments than this, and difficulties — not to say persecutions — are of the very essence of the Church Militant.
In France, following *Summorum Pontificum*, there were seven hundred petitions for new Masses — and those are only the ones that were recorded. How many were granted? Only a fraction. One must therefore persevere in asking, in insisting, and even in fighting. *Quaerite et invenietis, pulsate et aperietur vobis* — seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.
Christian recounted having requested a meeting with Cardinal Roche at least ten times, without result. When the staff of his Dicastery asked the reason for the request, he replied: to greet him, since he used to call regularly on his predecessor; to receive guidance; or simply to share a coffee. Nothing — not even a frank exchange.
It is evidently easier to take the path of easy decline, it seems, than to react and reverse the downward slope.
Evidently, they are afraid of us. We do not officially exist, but we inspire fear — because the new priests and the faithful are sympathetic to us and cannot understand the reasons (which are irrational and nonexistent) for preventing us from praying as all our ancestors have prayed.
___
RORATE NOTE: This has never happened before, with any pilgrimage, including those of SSPX, Orthodox, or Protestants. It just does not happen. We truly are the last pariahs.
Fine, this wicked generation shall pass as well.
By the way, do you know who isn't blocked from entering Saint Peter's Basilica as a pilgrimage?
The prideful...
The Haunting of America: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Fiction
Russell Kirk was not only a formative conservtive thinker of the 20th century; he also wrote ghostly stories like Old House of Fear and Lord of the Hollow Dark.
From The Imaginative Conservative
By Ben Reinhard, PhD
The ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Russell Kirk to extend his own sense of awe-filled wonder to a wider audience. He was keenly aware of the need for romance and mystery in everyday life—and how hard it was to achieve it in America. He created for his readers one of those places in the world where the cooperation of natural beauty, human art, and a deep sense of the past have created an environment specially conducive to wonder and contemplation.
Russell Amos Augustine Kirk is chiefly remembered today as a towering member of the postwar conservative movement: as the advisor to Goldwater and Reagan, the author of The Conservative Mind and The Roots of American Order, and the man who—in the words of the liberal British politician Hugh Gaitskell, “set socialism back a generation.”[1] Kirk’s wholly deserved fame as a conservative theorist has, regrettably, overshadowed another side of his literary personality: Kirk was also an accomplished and reasonably prolific writer of fiction, responsible for three full-length novels and a couple dozen short stories. These fictions attracted significant attention in their own day: his stories were praised by readers as diverse as T.S. Eliot, Madeleine L’Engle, Ray Bradbury, and Stephen King; “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” won a World Fantasy Award in 1977; and—according to Kirk—The Old House of Fear outsold all his other books combined. Kirk’s literary experiments also pose an enduring puzzle for readers. As Kirk himself put it in The Sword of the Imagination, the American public struggled to decide what to make of his stories: “readers began to fancy that there were two scribbling Russell Kirks: one who wrote grave historical and political works and essays for the literary and scholarly journals, and another who wrote Old House of Fear and published uncanny tales.”[2]
Closer examination can collapse the supposed paradox: the gap between the sober conservative critic and the literary master of shadows is not nearly so great as it might at first seem To begin with, and as all careful readers of Kirk know, his conservative mind was always colored by a vibrantly Gothic imagination. As he famously put it in his Confessions of a Bohemian Tory,
Mine was not an Enlightened mind… it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful . . . I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.[3]
It is only natural that such an imagination should find inspiration in the ghostly tale. And indeed, the ghost story is in many ways an inherently conservative form of tale-telling: it requires that readers deny—or at least suspend belief in—the materialistic positivism of the modern world, and presupposes the right of the past to guide the present. As Kirk wrote in Bohemian Tory, “the past is a ghost, to some people. But… the dead alone give us life.”[4]
The ghost story, then, was the perfect vehicle for Kirk to extend his own sense of awe-filled wonder to a wider audience. He was keenly aware of the need for a sense of romance and mystery in everyday life—and how hard it was to achieve it in America. In his examination of Hawthorne, Kirk noted “[Hawthorne] learned how hard was the task of a romancer in a land without the mystery and awe of antiquity.”[5] Hawthorne succeeded, Kirk argued, in his efforts, haunting the American imagination with “the ghost of old New England.”[6] It seems fitting to read Kirk’s fiction as a continuation and imitation of Hawthorne’s great task—and nowhere is this more clear than in the numerous stories (nearly half of the total corpus) set in Kirk’s native Michigan.
The region had fascinated Kirk since childhood: Mecosta County appeared to the young Kirk “like the empty land that peers out of the pages of the Mabinogion.”[7] The comparison here is telling: the Mabinogion is a collection of early Welsh folklore, providing us with (amongst other things) our earliest Arthurian legends. Rooted in the culture of early medieval Wales, the landscape of the Mabinogion is no very cheering prospect: tales like Culhwch and Olwen show us little islands of civilization surrounded by a vast, hostile wilderness. This empty land is wild, untamed, and savage—a land for giants and witches, and possibly heroes—but not ordinary men. And this, in Kirk’s imagination, is Michigan. Take, for instance, the opening to Kirk’s first ghost story, “Behind the Stumps”:
Pottawattomie [sic] County, shorn of its protecting forest seventy years ago, ever since has sprawled like Samson undone by Delilah, naked, impotent, grudgingly servile. Amid the fields of rotted stumps, potatoes and beans grow, and half the inhabited houses still are log cabins thrown up by the lumbermen who followed the trappers into this land. In Pottawattomie there has been no money worth mentioning since the timber was cut: but here and there people cling to the straggling farms, or make shift in crumbling villages.
This decaying waste is, transparently, Kirk’s own Mecosta (Mecosta County having been named for a Potawatomi chief). We learn, as the protagonist learns, what lurks behind the rotted stumps: a clan of half-savages, ruled by the enduring terror of an undying witch. A quasi-medieval glamour hangs over the whole story: in the protagonist’s last articulate thought before his death of terror, he compares himself to Launcelot in the chapel of the dead wizard. Similarly bleak prospects are offered in “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding.” Here, the hobo-hero Frank Sarsfield finds himself in a ghost town, cut off and ruined by the construction of a freeway. As Kirk has it, “This was depopulated country, its forests gone to the sawmills long ago, its mines worked out. The freeway ran through the abomination of desolation.”[8] The same desolate features—rotting stumps, cedar swamps, scrub brush, decayed farmsteads—tend to dominate and define the Michigan tales. In “Lost Lake,” Kirk compares the Michigan swamps to Macbeth’s blasted heath, and observes that the genius loci seems to be a malevolent spirit.
Perhaps the grimmest view of the Michigan backcountry, however, comes in “The Princess of All Lands”—one of Kirk’s more curious stories. The bulk of the tale is a very lightly fictionalized account of the real-life kidnapping of Kirk’s wife in 1975. Some of the imagery is familiar: “On they drove, bumping across the vestige of a forty-acre field, young poplars overgrowing most of it. Beyond the far boundary marked by a ragged stump fence, commenced a northern swamp-jungle, seemingly impenetrable. This must be some hardscrabble homestead abandoned decades ago, never truly fit for cultivation, now the lair of squatter predators.”[9] The land is waste, as it is in all of Kirk’s Michigan tales—but here, more clearly than in any other tale, we see its proper inhabitants. These “squatter predators” are compared elsewhere in the tale to Grendel’ s mother; in the end, they are revealed to be—appropriately enough—damned spirits. Kirk’s non-fictionalized version of the story, provided in his autobiography, strikes a similar note, identifying Annette’s kidnapper as “one of Tolkien’s trolls, masters of the desolation that hemmed in Rivendell.”[10] Kirk’s words here were chosen deliberately. His home at Piety Hill had been christened “Rivendell” by a friend, a last homely house; the surrounding Michigan wilderness is the reign of chaos and old night.
We see, then, that the comparison to the Mabinogion was not idle: the Mabinogion had Arthur’s fortress surrounded by witches from the uplands of hell and god-cursed savages; so too Michigan. Or, to take the other allusion, Piety Hill is Heorot—a refuge of light and learning; just beyond its borders are the fens and moors of the devil and his dam. Scholars like Vigen Guroian have argued that these Michigan vignettes are indebted to Eliot’s Wasteland—and on one level, they certainly are. Kirk was an admirer, friend, and critic of Eliot’s—and he was not shy about making use of Eliot in his fiction (indeed, all the character names in Kirk’s Lord of the Hollow Dark are drawn from Eliot’s poems). But there is a crucial difference between Eliot’s wasteland and Kirk’s. In Kirk’s stories, the Michigan waste tends to remain stubbornly unhealed: no healing rain comes, whatever the protagonist may do or dare.
Why is this? In the end, I would suggest it is because, crucially, Kirk does not want it to be healed. He loves it too much for that. This may seem paradoxical, but can be cleared up by a few key passages from the writings of Kirk and his circle. In a letter to a friend, Kirk described his stories as “fictionalized Michigan folklore.”[11] This is a noble goal: folklore is, after all, a vehicle for the wisdom of a people in narrative form, containing its traditions and folkways, past and identities, its connection to the land from which it sprung. Folklore shapes the reality in which we live; as the folklorist Frank Kramer has it in his Voices in the Valley, “The same landscape is framed by folk symbols and folklore into very different realities; and it is these separate little worlds that people really live in.”[12] To write folklore is nothing less than to shape the audience’s perception of the landscape they inhabit, effectively transforming their world. A man who once read Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel could never again view the ruins of Melrose Abbey as he did before; autumnal New York could never be the same after Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow.”
The tributes Kirk received during his lifetime give some indication of his success as a creator of folklore. One admirer called Kirk “the Washington Irving of Michigan.”[13] Others drew explicit comparisons to Scott: where Scott had been “the Wizard of the North,” Kirk was widely known as “the Wizard of Mecosta.” In some sense, this lofty praise is wholly justified: like those other literary alchemists, Kirk transformed his homeland, enchanting the depopulated and deforested Mecosta backcountry with a sense of terror and awe. There is, however, some reason for caution here: even if his friends’ praise rings true, Kirk’s description of his own project does not—not entirely, at least. Kirk’s stories do not, in plain point of fact, preserve fictionalized Michigan folklore; indeed, they bear precious little resemblance to any of the layers of folklore of the northern Midwest. Instead, they present events in Kirk’s life and in his family’s history as folklore. Nearly all the major characters (and many of the plots) in Kirk’s Michigan tales are drawn from his own personal experience: his ancestors, his wife, his daughters, his hobo-butler, and (repeatedly) Kirk himself all appear. Nor do stories preserve the folk-wisdom of Michigan—they represent the imposition of Kirk’s wisdom and experience onto Michigan. To put the matter simply, Kirk’s Michigan ghost stories do not record fictionalized Michigan folklore. They are an attempt to create it—and, in so doing, re-create the haunted Michigan landscape in the minds of his readers, and gnaw at their imaginations with the uncomfortable and uncanny. He wrote, as he asserted in “The Princess of All Lands,” “mainly in the hope of discomforting an old man on a winter’s night, or a girl in the bloom of her youth…. If I conjure up in you a dreadful joy, like that of a small boy on a secret stair, my malice will be satisfied.”[14]
If his malice was satisfied, his readers are the beneficiaries. We would all, I trust, want to live in an enchanted landscape—one of those places in the world where the cooperation of natural beauty, human art, and a deep sense of the past have created an environment specially conducive to wonder and contemplation: Guardini’s Lake Como, for instance, or old Edinburg or the Oxford countryside. Most of us, however, do not: we live in comparative wastelands like Mecosta, Michigan, or Front Royal, Virginia—or, really, anywhere in the vast stretches of American suburbia. But landscapes resistant to romance can still be Gothicized, and if we are not to have an enchanted world, a haunted world may very well be the next best thing. To borrow a line from “Sleepy Hollow,” the ghost story enables the reader to “imbibe the witching influence of the air, and begin to grow imaginative and to dream dreams, and see apparitions”—checking our pride, governing our actions, and inspiring a healthy terror. The ghost story has the power to enchant (albeit through terror) even those who have lost all other sense of the supernatural. “All things begin and end in mystery,” Kirk noted in his Enemies of the Permanent Things.[15] By confronting this mystery, Kirk’s ghostly tales—and especially those set in his own homeland—draw the reader to the wonder that is the beginning of philosophy, and the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom.
__________
Notes:
[1] Quoted in Bradley Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), p. 359.
[2] Russell Kirk, The Sword of the Imagination (Wilmington, DE: ISI Conservative Classics, 2002), p. 251.
[3] Russell Kirk, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory: Episodes and Reflections of a Vagrant Career (Hachette, U.K.: Fleet, 1963), p. 23.
[4] Ibid., p. 106.
[5] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (Washington, DC: Gateway Editions, 2001), p. 219.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Confessions, p. 9.
[8] Russell Kirk, “There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Winding,” in Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales, ed. Vigen Guroian (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publiching Co., 2004), p. 277.
[9] “The Princess of All Lands,” in Ancestral Shadows, p. 172.
[10] The Sword of Imagination, p. 364.
[11] Quoted in Birzer, Russell Kirk, p. 298.
[12] Frank Kramer, Voices in the Valley (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), p. xv.
[13] Quoted in Birzer, Russell Kirk, p. 298.
[14] “The Princess of All Lands,” in Ancestral Shadows, p. viii.
[15] Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Company, 1984), p. 49.
The featured image, uploaded by Neil Williamson, is a photograph, “Culross West Kirk.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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