Pseudo-Homilies 16 – Corpus Domini

This feast marks the closing of  the holiday season. I’ve always appreciated this wholesome, rich experience: a sequence of celebrations that manages to present newer and newer peaks of interest, significant and emotional moments, without tiring. It all begins with Lent, which is appropriately long: a preparation through acts of penance, which helps your faith grow and adds to the eventual enjoyment of the Easter feast itself. You get an appetizer with Palms Sunday. Then there’s the Easter Triduum, intense! And then a long Easter time, which even gets a double ending, with Ascension and Pentecost. And even then we’re not done yet! I understand it wasn’t always like that…

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Pseudo-Homilies From a Layman -8- Thomas’ finger

Second Sunday of Easter (or Sunday of Divine Mercy, Year A) “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”.   If you cut the quotation here you get a different impression, right? I mean: compared to when all the attention of the sermons and meditations on the text falls on Thomas and his “need to put his finger into the nailmarks to check”. I wanted to highlight this passage which in my opinion represents kryptonite for Jehovah’s Witnesses (keep in mind they…

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A Christmas for crucifixes

Getting tired of same ol’ same ol’? Looking for something unique to decorate your Christmas living room? There you go: A rotated Nagorno-Karabakh flag, morphed into an impromptu Christmas tree.   OK, that’s a stretch. Also… A bit off topic? Perhaps you’d feel more comfortable around the classic iconography, which includes Coke Santas, coniferous trees covered with strings of Chinese LED lights and multicolored balls, the whole shebang drenched in red and green hues…   The Republic of Artsakh, as it is called, is one of those states that don’t exist; more precisely, it doesn’t exist since 1991, when they voted in favor of their independence. The corresponding mountainous region…

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Describing the next political crisis in graph terms

Plus some obligatory ramblings about Islam. A comment posted under my article discussing the fickle behavior of voters inspired me to further elaborate on the nature of the political crisis ahead of us (Europeans, at least). The idea being: we’re facing a phase of instability, characterized by erratic election results but no significant choices being made, other than letting the current course continue unabated (top-down economic policies, EU mega-state “integration”; restrictions on freedom of speech, especially for non-Muslim religious groups; moral decay, gradual abolition of the family, culture of death; ethnic substitution through immigration). I compared the current situation, with many changes of direction but no real movement, to the…

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Does Marine Le Pen stand a chance?

UPDATE– She lost, as predicted. Since Macron’s victory is even more pronounced than was indicated by the polls when I wrote my article (in fact it seems people gradually increased their support for the creepy puppet guy in the last few days before the election), I might add there’s one obvious, additional effect in place. The natural instinct for moderation that is part of our DNA, so to speak, has been quietly exploited to reinforce the transformational trend: more EU, more immigration, more gender theory indoctrination in schools, more euthanasia, more globalization, more appeasement efforts to reach out to Islamists, less freedom of speech. Since this revolution is the new…

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Lent fasting & abstinence: do they make sense?

When I was in nursery school the nuns taught us to make some small sacrifices, which were labeled fioretti (literally: small flowers. This word expresses the idea of a small offer to the Virgin Mary). Good deeds, of course, but typically focusing on the effort itself, not on obtaining tangible results. I have a vivid memory of the small poster on the wall where we glued our tiny paper flowers, regular shapes comprised of a few red petals and a yellow circle in the middle. One flower for each fioretto (sacrifice) made: we felt rewarded for being good. And proud of the accomplishment! I don’t remember instead the specific subject of my…

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Understanding the Muslim Travel Ban kabuki theater

In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments modern liberals have to pretend not to know things. David Mamet   Donald Trump recently issued two different executive orders banning people from a few problematic Islamic countries from entering the US; in both cases, the orders have been blocked by rulings issued by district judges, despite the fact that travel restrictions on foreigners are a prerogative of the President of the United States, meant to protect the country’s interests.   Unnecessary explanation of the legal theater (please skip it)   To get to block the orders, they needed a pretty creative interpretation of a 1965 (Hart-Celler) Act, stating that you shouldn’t…

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What About The Netherlands? Wait. What about Islam?

women on a boat, contrasting attire: bikins, niqab

UPDATE ↓ Wilders can’t score Holland or Turkey?   Tomorrow, March 15, is election day in the Netherlands. Will Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch nationalist party PVV (Party For Freedom) win? I can’t pretend to know. I’m really not an expert. I may go out on a limb and predict that he will prevail, but only marginally, on the incumbent Mark Rutte. What you can put your money on is that Thursday’s newspapers across the western world will contain high howls from pundits lamenting the horrible risk for the stability of Europe and the survival of  democracy represented by the Ultra-Nationalist, xenophobic, Islamophobic far right movement led by Wilders.…

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Bethlehem: Christians abused by Islamists, but keep it to yourself…

Adorned altar next to graffiti

Here’s a thought-provoking link. (Notice that my original Italian link was from a different source, but it takes literally 0 seconds to find a different independent report that connects the inevitable dots getting to the same conclusion.) Christians flee from Bethlehem. Media sources will blame Israel again, but they mostly emigrate due to Islamists. Bethlehem! This article strikes a chord with me because I was visiting there in September, and I noticed the puzzling zeal with which the Franciscan Friars of the Custody of the Holy Land jumped at the opportunity to blame the Exodus of Christians on the economic crisis (!) I was appalled at their promptly applying the…

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