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The Most Beautiful Thing This Side of Heaven
From the bell preceding the priest’s entry, I was as engaged as I had ever been in any Mass.
From the bell preceding the priest’s entry, I was as engaged as I had ever been in any Mass.
Free societies need people like Eoghan Harris—courageous contrarians who defy the culture of amnesia. Such people are the vanguard of memory, reminding us that liberty is a precious but fragile asset that we must not take for granted.
The meeting focused on issues that will play a pivotal role in the survival and renewal of Western Civilization. In a roundtable discussion, participants zeroed in on topics central to our time—like immigration, national sovereignty, and the importance of the family.
It must have been quite terrifying for such a young lady to enter the Abbey, to take on such a huge responsibility. And yet she has lived up to it—openly, publicly, avowedly, unashamedly, and consistently a Christian monarch above all, to the last.
What is Davos if not a globalised version of the Palace of Versailles? What is Klaus Schwab if not an aspiring absolute king who markets himself as a benevolent technocrat?
This time, things are really getting serious because a point of no return has been reached. The French system finds itself confronted with an unprecedented situation that no one has been able to anticipate on such a scale: the recruitment of teachers is becoming impossible.
Liberal thinkers have fetishized their false image of the rule of law as a commitment to neutrality. The idea has become such a sacred article of the liberal faith, that any effort to draw upon our Judeo-Christian heritage is condemned as tyranny.
I would rather be ostracized for the truth than hide in shame living a lie. I refuse to embrace an illiberal, totalitarian ‘liberalism’ based upon distorted versions of truth, justice, and history.
Like so many other missionaries before him, on the shores of New France or in Asia, he proved that the ardent desire for missionary work is an extraordinary spur to progressing in the knowledge of others.
“A fellow Hungarian villager, Feri Augusztin, came to my father and told him to hand over his daughters, me and my sister Ella, to the Russians. This was the same person who earlier chased the Jews out of their homes. He informed the Russians that we were wealthy Hungarians and threatened Dad, saying that they would execute him unless he gave up his daughters.”
If conservatives seek to uphold the law of the home, it is because they consider it neither feasible nor desirable to transcend it. Hence, they defend the local over the universal and the familiar over the anonymous. Their attachment to their country is founded on reverence and fidelity to that place which made them, and whose geography, law and culture constitutes the fabric of their identity and the object of their true affection.
We should be open to receiving wholeness and beauty, open to the transcendent as it manifests in the bizarre fact of harmony, the startling presence of relationship. In this way we may manifest our oikos in all its coherence, its unity, and avoid developing the kind of resentment that would have us go about compulsively deconstructing our neighbor’s identity.
Any state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself. No state can survive if it consciously chooses to ignore these prerequisites. For the Serbs, the basis of their political life can only be found in the teachings of St. Sava.
It is easy to see why short-term jobs are conquering the market. They allow people to experience the freedom and moral comfort of a small business, something far more traditional than any nine-to-five job. They are also the natural response to our age of the internet and globalisation, ever-changing circumstances, and the over-bureaucratised corporate cultures.
By insisting on cultural neutrality, by insisting that it merely baby-proofs every hard edge and socket, the new mentality rejects any account of the anatomy of the human mind. It does not care, or does not know how to care, whether aspects of our lives distort our nature.
An important lesson emerges from the mediated individualism of Mazo and Velázquez’s family portraits. Nascent elites inevitably seek recognition by assimilation into, not the total destruction of existing social categories. Just as the monarch and feudalism were replaced by a bourgeois meritocracy, likewise too today’s revolutionary levelers will seek as much to reimagine hierarchy as to abolish it.
The New Puritans feign an aversion to pride and idols only insofar as it serves their political ends. They should be rejected as menacing imposters. But we should also reject a more sincere application of Puritan principles.
Today, we have almost forgotten the Holy Roman Empire; yet it was the empire that determined the history of Europe for almost a thousand years, and which gave the Germans a common legal framework to develop. This framework—and the shared idea of a Christian Occident—are brought together in the Imperial Crown.
Vienna and New Orleans, despite everything, have remained themselves in the face of larger cultures, consciously or otherwise, attempting (with some success) to reduce them to mere sameness.
Dante Alighieri’s significance stems from his work and extends beyond it. He is the quintessential European figure, epitomising the different strands which make Europe a culturally rich and distinct continent.
The challenge before us is to decide whether we believe in a universe created by a loving God who called us into being and who has destined us for eternal Communion with Himself, or whether we think we can only be ‘free’ by making ourselves like God and imposing our will on our body and the world?
The Enlightenment had its fair share of such confusion. It was a time of truly scientific pursuits; of Voltaire’s brave and sharp remarks; of Hume’s observant rationality. But it also produced Rousseau, whose romantic view of freedom inspired generations of rebels. They thought that only monarchs and nobles could be oppressive, for they had not yet seen tyranny of the people.
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