There are inordinately excitable Catholics who believe that only a Catholic sovereign is owed their loyalty and devotion. I remind them of the commandment of St. Peter: “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the Emperor.”

The connection between anti-hunting attitudes and fascism may, in fact, be a deep one.

Listening to pop music—like the rest of modernity—marks an education in unreality, which is no education at all. Folk music, on the other hand, is invariably rooted in the concrete reality of life.

It is very difficult to argue for the Burkean Contract. If one sees oneself as a morally isolated, radical individual for whom history means nothing and for whom nothing is owed to the future, no amount of disputation will let in the light.

The Festival of hunting is an example of real culture and the celebration of an inherited and fragile way of life.

What one finds here is a wonderful group of people from many walks of life, gathered together in friendship and comradery, to learn together, pray together, eat together, and rediscover what it is to be an heir of the great Christian civilisation that the modern West is now dedicated to repudiating.

If the Church as we know it is to survive, it must change course immediately. I have no doubt that in any future attempt to salvage what is left of it, Kwasniewski’s analyses will be invaluable.

Remember, you are not trying to establish an environment of tolerance and mutual-understanding. Like Isabella and Ferdinand, you are trying to recover the territory. Treat the new Left like people who hate you, because they do.

One of the terrible features of modernity is that we measure everything by the criteria of productivity and success. But we were not made to be productive, nor to be successful, at least not as our world understands such terms. We were made to flourish.

Restoring our proper relationship with the natural world, it must be asserted, does not entail a retreat from nature, but a renewed immersion in its mystery and a humble submission to its laws.

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic should draw enormous encouragement from this decision, with the take-home lesson being that history need not be just a sequence of victories by the increasingly noxious Left.

Mushrooms are teachers, and we ought to learn from them.