Persecution of Nuns Getting to be a New Episcopal Hobby? French Novus Ordo nuns Get the FFI Treatment.

It is not only Tradition, as most people understand it, 'Extraordinary Form' Mass and all that goes with it, that Francis and his toadies are determined to destroy. In their quest to destroy the Body of Christ, root and branch, they are not only targeting the TLM, but any Order or Institute that wants to actually preserve and practice Catholicism.

The Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate and their female branch, the SMOM, the Canons Regular of St John Cantius, and now these Sisters, the list keeps growing!

And it seems that the Bishop involved, an appointment of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, has been, as Miss White puts it, 'bergoglianized'. Another 'conservative' anxious to curry favour with the anti-Catholic heretics in Rome.

From What's Up With Francis Church

What do you think? Suspicious looking characters, right?

As I’m sure we all know, there’s nothing a bully likes more than an easy target. And if you’ve been in the Catholic Church more than five minutes you will understand how bishops are affected by the Vatican’s fine example.

These days, it seems if you are a canonically recognised religious community who wants to have things even a little bit more traditional, you can run, but apparently you cannot hide. Especially if your bishop is broke and you own a lot of property. Something the Petites Sœurs de Marie Mère du Rédempteur are finding out these days.

In February, Riposte Catholique published a circular letter from the sisters to their friends, saying that the were being “persecuted” in a way similar to that of the Vatican’s treatment of the Franciscans of the Immaculate.

The case is complex, but bears many points in common with the way the Vatican’s Congregation for Religious is dealing with those communities whom the progressive “New Paradigm”ists consider recalcitrants. Taking a closer look might give some insight into what other communities might expect if they dare to stand up for the integrity of their own charisms.

It is also noteworthy that this community is emphatically not “Traditional,” but merely what we used to call “conservative”. Their lay association (on Facebook here), start the discussion with a declaration of the sisters’ being “totally in line” with the “conciliar directions” of the Church since Vatican II; we see again that the comfortable “conservative” middle ground, the “reasonable compromise” of JPII-era Catholic conservatism, has evaporated.

This little community of novus ordo sisters – there are now 37 of them –  were founded in France in 1949, “dedicated to supporting priests, parishes and families” and the pursuit of the sanctification of the members of the community. They work in parishes doing lay formation and looking after old people in four nursing homes. The community is based in the diocese of Laval and has a presence in neighbouring archdiocese of Toulouse.

“Through this apostolate, the Institute ensures the protection and respect of the end of life, accompanying Christians to the elderly until their natural death. They are also concerned with supporting and training families in Catholic doctrine and spiritual life.” They are appreciated locally for their devotion to “traditional spirituality.”

“Our lifestyle is too classic to please, at a time when many are
sacrificing their ideal and the religious ideal to the spirit of the world.”

Notably, in 2012, the sisters returned to the wearing of their original habit,

from the modified version they’d been wearing since The Changes…

…that back-of-the-head-with-little-tuft-of-hair-showing veil we’ve all become so used to since the Asteroid. (If anyone tells you that the “form of dress” is an irrelevant side issue ask them why it’s not OK to go back to the original habits. Guess what; symbolic garments symbolise things.)

According to Riposte Catholique: “Bishop Thierry Scherrer, bishop of Laval since 2008, yet reputed to be a ‘classic,’ seems to have bergoglianized. He is uncomfortable with the presence of the seminar of the Community Saint-Martin, on his diocese, in Évron, and does not appreciate the too traditional way of the Little Sisters to live in spirit of reparation and contemplation and felt called to become their ‘Refounder’.”

Apparently, like Bergoglio, the bishop gets “worried” when a tradition-minded religious order starts getting too many young eager and faithful vocations and becomes well loved by the laity. In this case the bishop’s response to this “worry” was to delate his own sisters to Rome.

According to the lay organisation, (that you can find here on Facebook) following a merger of the sisters’ retirement homes with another [order] in Mayenne, Bishop Scherrer found himself an ex-officio member of the board of directors of the civil management association of these assisted nursing homes.” He reportedly began issuing orders about the management of these homes, despite his lack of experience in the field. Naturally these decisions met with resistance, and the bishop’s response was to initiate a “canonical visitation” on the order, an action that in our current epoch has become tantamount to a declaration of war. His two visitators, unsurprisingly, gave him a report on the life of the sisters that found them to be too traditional – accusing them of “sectarian excesses,” objecting to their return to the traditional habit and their rejection of modern media in the enclosure – which was then sent on to the Roman Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life of Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, of odious ill fame. (One has to wonder, while reading the story that follows, whatever happened to the good cardinal’s commitment to “dialogue”…)

The result of this delation was that the Congregation “suspended the Council of the Congregation and sent the Superior General and the Mistress of Novices into exile to distant monasteries for an indefinite period.” This left three apostolic commissioners, appointed by Rome, in charge of the congregation. An appeal by the sisters for a new canonical investigation was refused by the Congregation.

In a letter of February 28, 2018, “the Dicastery for Religious did not give the sisters the freedom to choose what seemed to them the best for their Institute and they were invited on pain of ‘dismissal of the Institute,’ to welcome the Commissioners appointed by this same Dicastery.”

These Commissioners included Sr. Monique Colrat, Superior General of the Congregation of Dominican Sisters of the Presentation of Mary…

…and Sr. Geneviève Médevielle, of the Auxiliatrices des Souls du Purgatoire and honourary professor of philosophy and theology at the Catholic Institute of Paris. We can perhaps predict her opinions about the remaining Tradition-minded Catholics, including sisters, by reading her appraisal of Amoris Laetitia.

Sr. Geneviève said of the infamous Chapter 8:

To want to oppose the doctrinal to the pastoral as some currents have done with regard to the Second Vatican Council, is to expose oneself to reducing both doctrine and pastoral work. The doctrine is then reduced to abstract formulas without taking into account the actual spiritual experience of Christ in the Church. Pastoral care, on the other hand, is reduced to normative practices that do not involve the mystery. In Amoris laetitia, the doctrine is omnipresent in the form of reminders of the tradition in matters of family and conjugal morality , it is incarnated in the necessities of the moment starting from a capital importance of the discernment animated by the meditation of the Scripture.

…

But if we consider the situation of cohabitation in its complexity, its temporality within a given culture taking into account the singularity and evolution of the cohabitants, it appears that there are many ways of living situations of cohabitation. One can understand then that they do not carry the same moral weight and do not lead to the same consequences according to the circumstances in which they live and according to the own motivations of the cohabitants. The clear denial of a long-term commitment is not like a cohabitation-step to get to know each other better or to make sure before a definitive commitment. If time is given priority over space as Pope Francis says, a cohabitation that the moral tradition describes as ‘objective situation of sin’ can be discerned as a ‘step in a route.’ This stage is marked by an incompleteness in relation to the good news of the Christian marriage, even tainted by a situation of sin according to the intentions of one or the other of the cohabitants. But in a thought that takes into account the temporality and unheard-of action of God, we can see this cohabitation as a ‘stage’ always open to grace and its deployment. Nobody is so fixed in a state or a situation. Every situation is open to the hope and transformative power of grace over time.

This is the same Commissioner who has now been appointed by Rome as the general superior of the community to replace the Superior General Mother Marie de Saint-Michel, elected according to the community’s approved constitutions. The sisters have denounced Sr. Geneviève’s lack of “knowledge of the specific charism of our founder” adding, “the whole congregation refuses these measures.”

The sisters write that the new superiors that have been forced on the community by Rome “have the mission to make us reflect and evolve on how we embody the charism and live our religious life,” without themselves having any knowledge of what that charism is.

“Too often in the history of the institutes, this type of measure has resulted in splits, departures, orientations taken that distort the charism clean to put it to the taste of the world under cover.

“We have every reason to fear that the action of the Commissioners at the head of our Congregation has serious consequences, more or less long term, both on the temporal and on the spiritual [situation].”

The sisters wrote, “The vagueness of the [report sent to Rome] is also most eloquent. Our lifestyle is too classic to please, at a time when many are sacrificing their ideal and the religious ideal to the spirit of the world .” The sisters have called the report “a caricature,” – “more of a pre-trial judgment than an objective statement of the situation of the Institute” that “does not reflect in any way the reality of life within our Congregation.”

They are appealing the decisions of the Congregation to the Apostolic Signatura. (A move, we might recall, availed the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate nothing whatever.)  They add that no findings were made that the sisters were violating either their own approved constitutions or French civil law, and at no time had the two suspended superiors “been warned of some breach, in the form of some reprimand or warning whatsoever.”

“[W]e do not understand that the bishop of Laval can accept to read us a
disastrous report of canonical visit, without asking any questions, even as three sisters of our institute have put themselves at his service and that of his mother, besides, for nine years, and especially, while all the sisters gathered to hear the said report urged immediately (but without success) a contradictory exchange with him,” the sisters continued.

In a letter dated June 15th, the sisters’ lay supporters wrote “In the civil society, this pressure, with these processes, could be a form of moral harassment condemned by the law.”

Marcel Mignot, President of the Support Association for the sisters, wrote in April, “[I]t is clear from this case that the canon law of the Church is being used as a scandalous recourse to bypass the functioning of civil law. We legitimately come to ask ourselves the question of Bishop Scherrer’s real motivations, of which we also know that the Diocese is experiencing financial difficulties…The patrimony of the Congregation would be a providential manna for this Diocese in a tense situation.”

This “tense situation” is a rather polite expression for a French diocese on the edge of financial collapse. The “diocese of Laval, like many dioceses in France, is financially desperate, surviving only through the regular sale of its assets: religious houses, presbyteries, etc. The situation is aggravated by the recent construction of a very expensive diocesan house. The bishop’s actions “would probably allow the diocese to recover one of the two institutions.”

Of course, I don’t know. Maybe these nuns are secretly guilty of some horrible canonical delict. Like … oh I don’t know… maybe they’re spending millions of the order’s money running guns or drugs or are into money laundering. Or maybe they were handing out condoms to prostitutes against the express orders of their superiors in religion. Or maybe they’re trying to normalise sexual immorality. Or perhaps they run about the world with unlimited quantities of cash from donors, handed over on demand, no-questions-asked, in order to live clandestine double lives. Or maybe they’ve been brainwashing their lay associates…

…or something…

I’ll try to keep track of this situation. I’ve signed up for their news updates. Meanwhile, those interested can sign a petition to the bishop to … well, I guess just leave them alone.

New Vatican Investments Chief Opposes Pro-Life Witness, Admires Luther

Once again, Francis appoints a heretic to high office. One who admires Luther's rebellion against the Church of Christ as a work of the Holy Ghost. At least, His Eminence Gerhard, Cardinal Müller called him out on it. Of course, that probably only made Francis admire the heretic more, since he's obviously an anti-Catholic, just like the boss.

From LifeSiteNews

Bishop Nunzio Galantino is the new president of the
Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

VATICAN CITY, June 29, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis’ new choice to handle the Vatican’s investment portfolio and real estate holdings has a rocky relationship with pro-lifers but admires Luther.

On June 22, the Vatican announced Bishop Nunzio Galantino, 69, as the new president of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA). He replaced Cardinal Domenico Calcagno, who turned 75 in February.

Pope Francis told Reuters news service a week earlier that he was looking for a candidate who displayed an “attitude of renewal.”  

“I am studying candidates who have an attitude of renewal, a new person after so many years,” he told his interviewer. “Calcagno knows the functioning well, but perhaps the mentality has to be renewed.”

However, critics of the new APSA chief believe Galantino’s attitude toward doctrine is in need of renewal.

In 2014, when he was the secretary-general for the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Galantino told a interviewer, “In the past, we have concentrated exclusively on (saying) “No” to abortion and euthanasia. It can’t be like this, between (birth and death) there is a developing existence.”

Galantino indicated also that he did not feel common cause with pro-lifers who witness outside abortion businesses.

“I do not identify with the expressionless faces of those who recite the rosary outside the clinics who practice interruption of pregnancy  (‘l’interruzione della gravidanza’), but with those young people who are opposed to this practice and strive for the quality of life of the people, for their right to health, to work,” he said.

In response, John Smeaton of England’s Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child wrote an open letter to Galantino asking him to retract his statements and to meet with him.

“I really don’t think you would be saying, if national laws had allowed the killing of Catholic priests or Jews over the past few decades: ‘In the past, we have concentrated too much on the killing of Catholic priests or Jews … ’ Indeed, you would probably be saying, ‘We can never do enough to denounce this grotesque evil,’” Smeaton stated.

In 2017, Galantino was upbraided by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who had recently been ousted as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, for calling Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church the work of the Holy Spirit.

During an address at Rome’s Pontifical Lateran University on the topic of “the spirituality of the Reformation in ecclesial practice,” Galantino reportedly said, “The Reformation was, is, and will be in the future, an event of the Spirit,” and “The Reformation carried out by Martin Luther 500 years ago was an event of the Holy Spirit,” according to various Italian media.

“The Reformation corresponds to the truth expressed in the saying ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda,’” Galantino is quoted as saying. “It was the same Luther who did not make himself the cause of the Reformation, writing: ‘while I was sleeping, God was reforming the Church.'”

In response, Cardinal Müller published an article in La Nuova Bussola saying it was “unacceptable to assert that Luther’s reform ‘was an event of the Holy Spirit.’”

"On the contrary, it was against the Holy Spirit,” the cardinal continued. “Because the Holy Spirit helps the Church to maintain her continuity through the Church’s magisterium, above all in the service of the Petrine ministry: on Peter has Jesus founded His Church (Mt 16:18), which is 'the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth' (1 Tim 3:15)."  

Müller added, “The Holy Spirit does not contradict Himself.”  

Newfoundland Memorial Day

It's 00.00 NDT on the Rock, so it's Memorial Day in Newfoundland. In the rest of Canada it's Dominion Day, but in Newfoundland, today is dedicated to remembrance, remembering the men of the (Royal) Newfoundland Regiment who fell during the Great War in service of their King and Country.

The Flag of the independent Dominion of Newfoundland,
under which the Regiment fought.

Today is the 102nd Anniversary of the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel and the opening of the Battle of the Somme, of which Beaumont-Hamel was a part. At 08.45 that morning, the Regiment was ordered forward. Most of the Regiment who had started forward were dead, dying or wounded within 15 to 20 minutes of leaving their trench.

So far as can be ascertained, 22 officers and 758 other ranks were directly involved in the advance. Of these, all the officers and slightly under 658 other ranks became casualties. Of the 780 men who went forward only about 110 survived unscathed, of whom only 68 were available for roll call the following day. For all intents and purposes the Newfoundland Regiment had been wiped out, the unit as a whole having suffered a casualty rate of approximately 90 percent.

Major-General Sir Beauvoir De Lisle, KCB, KCMG, DSO said, referring to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel,

It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.

In recognition of its valour, His Majesty King George V bestowed the prefix 'Royal' on the Regiment in December 1917. This was the only time during the First World War that this honour was given and only the third time in the history of the British Army that it has been given during a time of war.

Garb of Old Gaul, the slow march of the Regiment, honouring the Scottish roots of Newfoundland, played by the Pipes and Drums of the Black Watch.

The Banks of Newfoundland, the Regimental 

quick march, played by the Regimental Band

Stand down, Men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, your duty is done. You served your King and Country well, now rest in peace.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Lest we forget! Lest we forget!

The Last Post

42 New Priests for the Traditional Movement

Glorious news! As the modernist, heretical Church dies on the vine, the Traditional Institutes and orthodox Dioceses continue to ordain more men to stand at the Altar of God, offering the Sacrifice of the Son to the Father.

I have said for years that there is no lack of vocations to be an alter Christus, offering the Holy Sacrifice. Men are willing to forsake marriage and a family for that high ideal. What is lacking is men who are willing to be celibate social workers in a Roman collar!

Please pray for these new Priest of God.

From The Remnant

Guild of Blessed Titus crunched the numbers and discovered the trad movement is gaining at least 42 new priests this summer:

The break down is as follows:

Society of Saint Pius X:   16

Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter:   16

Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest:   6

Institute of the Good Shepherd:  4

REMNANT COMMENT: At this moment, when so many of us are disheartened and even fearful for the future of the Church and of our children and even our own final perseverance, it is understandable that we might be tempted to find reason to lash out at this report because not all of these new young priests hail from the society, fraternity or institute ofwhich we personally approve or support.

But I wonder if it might not still be possible for all of us to take a moment to reconsider this and to instead offer a word of thanks to Almighty God that, regardless of the affiliation of these young men, they nevertheless have managed to hear and answer His call to the holy priesthood and to the celebration and promotion of the Traditional Latin Mass.

Let's try to not lose sight of the fact that it is because of the solid prayer life of these new priests as well as their careful attention to their vocations in life--it is because of this that tens of thousands of young people and thousands of families over the next fifty years will have access to the traditional Sacraments of the Church, to orthodox catechetical formation, to weekly confession, to daily Mass--the Mass of the Saints and Martyrs, the 'most beautiful thing this side of heaven'--and to the authentic Catholic parish life. 

In cooperation with God's grace, think of what that means to so many thousands of would-be lost souls who will now have access to the spiritual means that help us all to fulfill the reason God gave us life in the first place--to know, love and serve Him in this life so that we can be happy with Him forever in the next.  Nothing is of greater import to souls than this. Nothing will do more for the common good of our society than this.

God in His mercy and in His good time will help us all to overcome the divisions that exist between us--divisions that admittedly are not insignificant.  But regardless of the post-Vatican II turmoil in the world today and the accompanying doubt and loss of faith, it was nevertheless His voice that each and every one of these young men heard at some point over the past decade--even despite the unrest, the apostasy, the rebellion, the weeping and gnashing of teeth in the Christophobic modern world.

 In this year of Our Lord 2018, somehow in God's providence, 42 young men decided to shut out the noise of war, revolution and temptation all around them, in order to make quiet commitment to give the rest of their lives to God's service and to the service of the Church-- which is to say the service of us all.  No wives. No children. No glamorous careers. No piles of money.  Just service to souls.

If we cannot find it in our hearts to celebrate this happy reality--that somehow these young men made it through the storms of doubt and uncertainty and temptation...that somehow their mothers raised them with enough faith, hope and love to shut it all out and to answer the call to the Holy Priesthood--if we cannot celebrate this, then perhaps we're losing focus on the point and purpose of our movement and indeed the point and purpose of why God put us on this earth in the first place.

May God bless and keep these young men; may He help us all to take comfort from their young example of commitment to His service; may He show us how to understand what He wants of us and even where He wants us to be.  And may He never abandon us by leaving us spiritual orphans in a world without Catholic priests, without the alter Christus, the knights of Our Lady, the servants of the altar of sacrifice. 

We thank God for these young priests, we congratulate them, and we ask them to pray for us all that our faith will not fail us just as theirs has obviously not failed them.  Tu es Sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech.

Church Authorities Have Allowed Bigamy – Bishop Schneider

Thank God there are still Prelates like Bishop Schneider, and Cardinal Burke who are not afraid to stand for the Faith of Christ in the face of heresy emanating from Rome, and the all-encroaching secular, atheist, Freemasonic State.

From Gloria.tv

It is undeniable that Church authorities at different levels [also Pope Francis] have allowed divorce in "exceptional cases" by admission of adulterers to Communion, Bishop Athanasius Schneider told Il Giornale (June 28).

Schneider stressed that nobody [the Pope included] has the power to dispense from the sixth Commandment.

Regarding illegal mass-immigration, Schneider noticed that there is an “orchestrated plan by international powers to radically change the Christian identity of European populations”.

He praises governments who exercise their sovereignty against “a new Soviet Union type of totalitarianism - today called the European Union - with its unmistakably Masonic ideology”.

Schneider further called homosexual adoptions “a moral abuse of the children”, a “blatant injustice” and “one of the greatest degradations of civilization”.

Cardinal Burke, No Holy Communion Without Catholic Faith

You know that, Your Eminence, I know that, and any decently catechised Catholic knows that. It is the immemorial teaching of the Church of Christ, enshrined in Canon Law. But what difference does it make? It's standing in the way of Francis' plans to destroy the Church, so it will be ignored!

From Gloria.tv

Holy Communion may not be administered to non-Catholics, Cardinal Raymond Burke wrote to LifeSiteNews.com (June 28).

Burke stated that “sentimental considerations” are no basis for receiving Communion because "receiving Holy Communion means that you accept all that the Catholic Church teaches.”

Burke, who until 2014 led the Church High Court, called for a revision of the fuzzy canon 844 in Church Law.

This canon allows intercommunion in emergency situations like imminent death, “In such a case, once the emergency has passed, the question is why has the person not entered into the full communion of the Catholic Church.”

Official Apostasy: First German Diocese Introduces Protestant Communion

And what is even more scandalous is that absolutely nothing will be done about it. These heretics know that, and they know that they are scoring brownie points with the boss by furthering his plans to destroy the Church of Christ!

From Gloria.tv

Paderborn Archbishop Hans-Josef Becker is the first German bishop to officially introduce [heretical] intercommunion, that de facto was practiced for decades in Germany.

According to the Westfalenblatt (June 30), Becker told his priests that he expects them to act according to a heretical text which recently was published by the German bishops.

In “individual cases” [meaning: in all cases] the priests should [meaning: are obliged to] give Communion to Protestants, Becker told Westfalenblatt.

This means that the German apostasy from the Church is now officially accomplished.

Anti-Christian Violence in Nigeria Could Become Another Rawanda, Says Bishop

Of course, it's genocide directed against the Christians! Our choices as far as as the 'Religion of Peace' is concerned are, 1) convert, 2) submit to sharia law and pay the jizya, or 3) die!

From the Catholic Herald

A peaceful demonstration by Christians in April this year, following the murder of two priests and their parishioners (Photo: Aid to the Church in Need)

Addressing the international community, Bishop Avenya said: 'Don’t wait for the genocide to happen before intervening'
A bishop in Nigeria has warned of the threat of genocide against Christians in the country’s middle belt region, describing an upsurge of violence by militant Fulani herdsmen as “ethnic cleansing”.

Bishop William Avenya of Gboko told Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) of growing fears amid reports that, so far this year, 492 people have died in Benue State, which has a Christian-majority population.

In an appeal to the international community, he told ACN: “Don’t wait for the genocide to happen before intervening… Please don’t make the same mistake as was made with the genocide in Rwanda. It happened beneath our noses, but no one stopped it. And we know well how that ended.”

Local reports on Wednesday, 27 June, said extremists “slaughtered more than 200 people” in 10 mainly Christian communities near the city of Jos, although police said there were 86 fatalities.

Bishop Avenya said: “The [militant Fulani] are criminals and terrorists, but they do not do the same things in the majority Muslim areas. We are convinced that what is happening is an ethnic cleansing of Christians.”

Bishop Avenya’s account comes after other senior Church figures from the region described the militant Fulani campaign as a “clear agenda of Islamising the Nigerian Middle Belt”.

They include two other prelates from Benue State, Bishop Peter Adoboh of Katsina-Ala, Bishop Wilfred Anagbe of Makurdi, and Bishop Matthew Audu of Lafia, from nearby Nassarawa state.

According to research by Christian persecution charity Open Doors, as many as 725 people died in violence in the middle belt’s southern Kaduna region in sixteen months (to September 2017) – 98 per cent of them Christians.

Bishop Avenya recalled Nigeria-wide peace demonstrations on 22 May and appealed to the West to save lives in the country: “Our faithful are being murdered or forced to live as refugees as a result of the violence. And the West continues to view the matter of the Fulani as merely an internal problem.”

In April, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) issued a statement calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign for alleged inaction in response to what the CBCN called “the killing fields and mass graveyard that our country has become”.

Bishop Avenya also spoke of the supply of weaponry now used by militant Fulani. He said: “At one time these pastoralists were armed only with sticks. But now they are armed with AK-47 rifles – expensive weapons that they could not possibly afford. So who is supplying them?”

He added: “And besides, in these areas there are checkpoints every two kilometres. Is it possible that armed men followed by their flocks of cattle could have somehow become invisible?”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2018 report found that “herder-farmer conflicts and ethno-religious tensions continued to rise… [with] increased reports of concerns of an ethnic cleansing campaign against Christian communities”.

Additional reporting by Murcadha O Flaherty

Kamehameha the Great

To follow the Chevalier's discussion of the Kingdom of Hawai'i, here are two short videos on the founder thereof, Kamehameha the Great. They cover the formation of the Kingdom and the beginning of its downfall due to the influence of American, Calvinist republicans.

From the YouTube channel, Extra Credits

Chevalier Charles Coulombe on The Kingdom of Hawaii

A fascinating discussion of the Kingdom of Hawai'i and its subversion and destruction by the white, sugar oligarchy, including Dole Pineapple.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

A short biography cum chronological bibliography of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a great influence on my thought, economics, and politics, tho' I've never bought his Liberalism and his anti-imperialism.

From the ChesterBelloc Mandate

"Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son of Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England, assures prayers dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction."

- cable from the Holy See to Cardinal Hinsley

The paternal great-grandfather, grandfather and father of G. K. Chesterton were engaged in the business of selling houses,-house agents, as they are called in England. His father, Edward, married Marie Grosjean, whose family had long been English, but had originally come from French Switzerland. They had three children, Gilbert, born on May 29, 1874, Cecil, five years his junior, and Beatrice, who died in childhood.

Gilbert's father distinguished between living and making a living: a successful businessman, he had a dozen hobbies, not the least of them the making of a toy-theatre, and he was widely read, especially in English literature.

A happy childhood in a happy home laid the foundation for Gilbert's sane and sensible outlook on life. As a little boy he read fairy tales; as a big boy he wrote and illustrated them, some of which are preserved in his book The Coloured Lands. Gilbert first attended Colet Court School, entering St. Paul's as a day student when he was twelve. The reports on him for his six years there (1887-92) were that he was a good boy but an indifferent student, a dreamer, interested chiefly in drawing and English literature. In his "dramatic journal,"kept irregularly from his sixteenth year, he dramatized scenes from Scott and burlesqued portions of Shakespeare. He later acknowledged the strong influence on his youthful formation made by the Junior Debating Club, of which he was chairman. It met weekly at the home of one of its dozen teenage members and, following tea, one of them read a paper which was then debated. In the issues of its organ, The Debater, his first prose and verse were printed; his essays on Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Burns, and Wordsworth being noteworthy. In his last year at St. Paul's (1892), he entered a competition for a prize poem (on St. Francis Xavier), and won it. From 1892 to 1895 he studied art at the Slade School and during part of the time he attended lectures on English literature at University College. A fellow-student whose family controlled the publishing firm of Hodder & Stoughton gave him some art books to review in the firm's monthly, The Boohman. And upon leaving Slade, he entered the office of a publisher of spiritualistic literature and later the office of the general publisher, Fisher Unwin. There he began to write Greybeards at Play as well as to revise, edit and counsel the works of others.

At St. Paul's Gilbert formed lifelong friendships with the future writer Edmund C. Bentley and with Lucian Oldershaw. In 1896 Lucian was courting Ethel Blogg (anglicized from Blogue) and took Gilbert with him to call. At first sight he fell in love with her sister Frances and, after a courtship extended by his then meager earnings, they were married in 1901. It was Lucian who, in 1900, also introduced the twenty-six-year old Gilbert to the thirty-year-old Belloc. Their reciprocal influence was lifelong as was their friendship.

In 1899 Gilbert began writing for The Speaker, a Liberal weekly. His first book, a volume of comic verse which he also illustrated, Greybeards at Play, was successfully published in 1900; later that year, his father financed publication of his second book, The Wild Knight and Other Poems. But it was his brilliant though unpopular pro-Boer stand on the Boer War which first brought him to public attention, and by 1901 he also was writing regularly for The Daily News. His third book, The Defendant (1901), comprised some of his essays from The Speaker, and is suffused with paradoxes, a literary form which has since been associated with his name. ("I did not acquit Chesterton of paradox," wrote his great admirer Msgr. Knox, "but, after all, what was a paradox but a statement of the obvious so as to make it sound untrue?")

He prided himself on being a journalist, and much of his work was first published in the popular journals of the day, many of his books being collected and edited from these essays, and much more of it has never been collected at all.

He was a tall man-six-foot two, and a stout one- nearly three hundred pounds; he dressed unconventionally in a wide-brimmed slouch hat and a flowing cloak; and carried a walking stick; he had a leonine head and a rather straggly blonde mustache. By the time he was only thirty-two he had become famous, instantly recognized in public and in caricature. True, some of his most popular works had been published by then: G. F Watts (1902), Twelve Types (1902), Robert Browning (in the English Men of Letters series, 1903), The Napoleon of Notting Nill, which he called his first important book (1904), The Club of Queer Trades(1905), Heretics (1905), and Charles Dickens (1906). And in social intercourse he was already one with such personalities of the day as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Laurence Binyon, James M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Swinburne, George Meredith, Yeats, and Granville Barker.

In 1904, Sir Oliver Lodge invited him to become a candidate for the Chair of Literature at Birmingham University, but he declined. The invitation was doubtless extended on the strength of his books on Browning and on Dickens. The success of the latter was such that he was requested to write a series of prefaces to all of Dickens' novels.

At the time of his marriage he believed in the basic Christian religious truths but in no particular religion. His wife was a convinced Anglo-Catholic, and she was particularly pleased when in 1905 he accepted an invitation to be the first of a series of lay preachers in St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden.

From this time on there was an almost constant stream of lecture engagements far and wide and to almost every type of organization,-religious, literary, social, and even political. He was famous, he was wanted, and he couldn't say no. His wife became his secretary recording times, places, subjects, and arranging itineraries. He became so pressed for time that he had to write at odd moments and to do his newspaper essays at deadline. This constant pressure extended from 1904 to 1908. He was notoriously absent-minded. Typical was the telegram he sent his wife when he was en route to give a lecture: "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?~' He hated physical exertion as much as he reveled in mental activity.

Another phantasy, The Man Who Was Thursday(1907) was followed by Orthodoxy (1908). When Gilbert had attacked the philosophy of G. S. Street, he retorted that he would worry about it when G.K. would clarify his own. The result was Orthodoxy, a series of positive arguments for Christianity. Etienne Gilson considered it ''The best piece of apologetic the century has produced." Incidentally, Gilbert sold the manuscript outright for about $400.00. The meager returns on his numerous and popular writings moved him at this time to employ a literary agent; with gratifying results.

He began a weekly column, "Our Notebook,'' in The Illustrated London News in 1905 and continued it until his death thirty-one years later.

In 1909 he and his wife moved from Battersea, London, to the suburban town of Beaconsfield, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives. Their desire for children was never to be fulfilled; later they adopted Dorothy Collins who had become Gilbert's secretary in 1926. At Overroads, their Beaconsfield home, he was removed from the bustle and bars of Fleet Street and had more leisure for his friends: Max Beerbohm, Jack Phillmore, Msgr. O'Connor, Maurice Baring, Belloc, George Wyndham, Msgr. Knox, and a host of others. But his social life did not deter the stream of his books, as witness The Ball and the Cross, What's Wrong With the World (changed by his publishers from What's Wrong? and in which he formulated his sociology), Alarms and Discursions, and Blake (all published in 1910), Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, The Innocence of Father Brown, and, what many deem his greatest writing, The Ballad of the White Horse (all published in 1911). Too, his interest in politics, which he had had from boyhood, became more active: he began by fighting the sale of peerages as a means of secretly raising party funds, and continued blasting every other form of political corruption. Of necessity this interest included social reform, public education, a free press, etc. He resigned from the Liberal owned Daily News (a property of Cadbury of Cadbury's Cocoa) to write for the Daily Herald. He doubtless resigned just before being asked to, for his recent statements regarding the Liberal party leaders included: "Some of them are very nice oldgentlemen, some of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old without being gentlemen at all." And again, "The best of His Majesty's Ministers are agnostics, and the worst are devil worshippers." This hit hard because at least nominally Church of England men (some ecclesiastics) were the predominant rulers of the realm.

Reacting against what they believed wrong with the English social-economic condition, Gilbert, his brother Cecil, and Belloc formulated their own program: Distributism. One of their principal points of controversy was over private ownership, chiefly ownership of the land which was tragically curtailed by the law of enclosure by which some five million acres ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich. In books and articles they carried on their fight for the liberty of Englishmen against increasing enslavement to a plutocracy, and to expose and combat corruption in public life. As their audience increased and took form, they decided upon publishing their own paper. It was called The Eye Witness, from 1911-12, The New Witness, from 1912-23, G.K.'s Weekly, from 1925-36, and The Weekly Review, since 1936. It was edited at various times by each of the three. In the Marconi case, they contended that Godfrey Isaacs had used Rulus Isaacs to purchase ministerial favor. The court verdict in this complicated litigation was a gentle rebuke to the Isaacs and a small fine for editor Cecil. So small in view of the serious charges made that the Chesterbelloc considered it a moral victory. But the government then showed its contempt for integrity by appointing Godfrey Isaacs as the Viceroy of India and giving Rufus the title of Lord Reading.

Gilbert's books in this period included Manalive(1911), A Miscellany of Men, essays (1912), The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), and The Flying Inn (1914). His poetic play, Magic, was produced in England in October 1913, and in Germany soon afterward. And following a conversation with Msgr. O'Connor on the subject, he wrote his best known single poem, "The Ballad of Lepanto" (19 12).

In September 1916, Cecil enlisted as a private in the army and died in France on December 6, 1918. Upon his enlistment, Gilbert succeeded him as editor of The New Witness.

Gilbert went on a lecture tour to Palestine (which became a determining factor in his conversion) in 1919, to Italy in 1920, and to the United States in 1921-22 and again in 1930-31. From these travels came The New Jerusalem (1920), What I Saw in America (1922) and Sidelights on New London and Newer York(1932). His American tour included a series of thirty-six lectures on Victorian literature and history at the University of Notre Dame (his poem "The Arena" commemorates his visit), as well as talks delivered at San Francisco, Omaha, Oklahoma City, Nashville, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities.
The same period witnessed the publication of his Irish Impressions (1919), The Uses of Diversity (1920), The Superstition of Divorce (1920), Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922), and Fancies Versus Fads (1923). Some idea of his intellectual fertility is indicated by the fact that at one time he had thirty books contracted for with various publishers.

Gilbert's brother Cecil had become a Catholic shortly before going to war and Gilbert himself had been forming a Catholic mind slowly but steadily from about the same time. But he was not one to be hurried and fortunately even his closest friends, Maurice Baring and Ronald Knox (themselves converts), though he acknowledged their influence upon him, did not try to hurry him. Eventually it was Father O'Connor who received him into the Church in 1922. On the same day he wrote his celebrated poem "The Convert." By her own conscience his wife followed him into the fold four years later.

The time between the death of The New Witness in 1923 and the birth of G.K.'s Weekly in 1925 gave him sufficient leisure to write two of his most important books: St. Francis of Assisi (1923) and The Everlasting Man (1925) . But to the paper which enshrined his brother's memory though it now bore his own initials, Gilbert devoted much of his time as editor from 1925 to 1930. Most of those who knew him regarded it as a sacrifice. Besides Belloc and himself, a steady contributor was Eric Gill; out of friendship for Gilbert, Shaw and Wells contributed occasionally.

In 1926 the social and economic program of the paper feathered the Distributist League, of which Gilbert was elected president. He stated that ''Their simple idea was to restore possession." To restore property and prosperity to the people from whom it had been taken by big government and big business. Distributism was to be a practical alternative to Capitalism and Socialism. Branches were soon established throughout England and the circulation of its organ, G.K.'s Weekly, rose from 4,650 to 8,000 copies. The influence of the movement far exceeded its numbers; men like Father McNabb, O.P., in England (whom some hold fathered rather than was a disciple of the movement), Msgr. Ligutti in the United States, Dr. Coady and Dr. Tompkins in Canada, as well as others in Australia and New Zealand, acknowledged its influence upon their labors.

Despite the yearly loss by the paper and his constant charity to the needy, from panhandlers to causes, Gilbert helped to build the Church at Beaconsfield, until then a mission of High Wycomb parish. It became his memorial.

In 1926 were published The Outline of Sanity, The Catholic Church and Conversion, The Incredulity of Father Brown (as Gilbert said to Father Rice, "My publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses"), and The Queen of the Seven Swords; in 1926, his Collected Poems, The Return of Don Quixote (which first appeared serially in G.K.'s Weekly), Robert Louis Stevenson, The Secret of Father Brown, and a play, The Judgment of Dr. Johnson. Like his Magic, it was successful as literature, not as theatre. The Father Brown detective stories brought him charter membership in the Detection Club (1929) and soon afterwards its presidency.

He spent a month of 1927 in Poland, a nation whose true place in Europe he held high. Two years later his visit to Rome resulted in The Resurrection of Rome(1930). His more successful books of this period were his Catholic essays, The Thing (1929), and the two volumes of general essays, Come to Think of It (1930) and All Is Grist (1931), and his reflections flowing from the Eucharistic Congress which he and his wife attended in 1932, Christendom in Dublin, his studies of Chaucer and of St. Thomas Aquinas. Of this last, Etienne Gilson, a foremost Thomistic scholar, said: "I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. And P'ere Gillet, O.P., MasterGeneral of the Dominican Order, lectured on and from it to large meetings of Dominicans.

From 1932 until his death he engaged increasingly in radio lectures, delivering as many as forty a year over the B.B.C. The B.B.C. is a state monopoly (as such, Gilbert attacked it: "It is wicked to nationalize mines and railroads; but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk''), and he had to submit a manuscript for each lecture; but, for the sake of spontaneity, he was not held to the letter of it. These talks were so well received that a B.B.C. official remarked after his death that "G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House." Too, they reached untold thousands who had never read his writings.

While in Rome, Gilbert interviewed Mussolini and had an audience with the Holy Father. In 1934 he was elected, honoris causa, to the Athenaeum Club. Both he and Belloc were invested as Papal Knight Commanders of the Order of St. Gregory with Star. At his death in 1936 the Holy See cabled Cardinal Hinsley: "Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son of Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England, assures prayers dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction." The panegyric was delivered in Westminster Cathedral by Msgr. Ronald Knox. His monument was designed by Eric Gill and burial was at Beaconsfield. His wife survived him by a little more than two years.

He had employed his great God-given gifts with humility and charity; indeed these two virtues characterized his life.

Books on him are numerous: first in time and also very important is G. K. Chesterton: a Criticism (1908), published anonymously but later learned to be by his brother Cecil; Belloc's brief but brilliant The Place of Chesterton in English Letters (1940); Father Brown on Chesterton (1937) by Msgr. John O'Connor; The Laughing Prophet (1937) by Emile Cammaerts is concerned more with the man than with the writer; Chesterton As Seen by His Contemporaries (1939), includes material by Gilbert himself, edited by Cyril Clemens; Gilbert's Autobiography (published posthumously in 1936), in which, with characteristic humility, he seems bent upon writing about everyone but himself; and the definitive biography, G. K. Chesterton (1943) by his long-time friend, Maisie Ward (Mrs. Frank J. Sheed).