Names are important, and the name ‘conservative’ is important if we are not to forget who we are and what we strive for. Conservatives are not merely reactionaries. We affirm something. We affirm our civilisation and we want to conserve it.
Christians, whatever their religious divisions, should work together to undermine and ultimately destroy the liberal and progressivist supremacy that dominates the West, recognising that it marks a settlement incompatible with even a basic Biblical worldview.
The desire of boys to carry pocketknives, it seems to me, is one that should be nurtured. A pocketknife makes one more useful to others, and being at the service of others is what turns a boy into a man.
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.