VIDEO: Michael Matt rails against "the Current Thing"

Before we get into the latest episode of The Remnant Underground, a word about yesterday's French election. Frenchmen and women [and "others"? Ed.] voted in the first round of the election for the presidency of the French Republic. Walt rejoiced (see previous post) when Marine Le Pen fnished a strong second to "Effete Emmanuel" Macron, whom she will now face in the runoff election on April 24th.

However, I must warn you, dear readers, to be careful how you bet. The likelihood of large numbers of centrists, leftists and Communists moving into the National Rally camp is slim. More likely is an ABLP coalition which would push M Macron into the Élysée Palace for a second term -- just as it did in 2015. Walt will be hoping (and praying!) otherwise, but betting? Nooooo....

 

Now then, about the video. Michael Matt, editor of the Remnant newspaper, doesn't talk about the French election, because it was unfolding as he was recording this episode. He does, however,  discuss the victory of Viktor Orbán, who last week, against all odds (and opposition from the entire Soros machine), won a fourth term as Prime Minister of Hungary.

"Did you hear about that (Mr Matt asks)? No? Maybe that’s because they don’t want us to know about that. If we think of Orbán at all, the media will help us to think of him not as a family man and father of five beautiful children, but rather as a goose-stepping Nazi who’s coming to take us away, oh my! So, what’s Orbán all about, and what does his stunning victory portend?"

Mr Matt analyses "the Current Thing" as defined by G.K. Chesterton a hundred years ago. "What is the Current Thing (Mr Matt asks) and how is it being used – from Covid to Ukraine – to create 'right thinking' throughout the world and to punish anyone who questions the current narrative." He uses the media misinformation about Viktor Orbán to make his case that we're being lied to about a lot of things going on in the world today, including and especially the war in Ukraine. He says it's time to wake up!

Walt joins Mr Matt in wishing all our readers a miserable Holy Week.

Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc foresaw Islamic jihad in 1938

On New Year's Eve, while Muslim "refugees" were assaulting and robbing women in Cologne and other European cities (see "Trump warns Germans after asylum-seekers' sex and crime spree"), Breitbart published an article by Thomas Williams, Ph.D., headed "Hilaire Belloc in 1938: Islam ‘the Most Formidable and Persistent Enemy’ of Western Civilization". It's timely reading precisely because of the events of that night.

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870-1953) was known as an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, man of letters, soldier, political activist, historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early 20th century. He was President of the Oxford Union, and later a Member of the British Parliament from 1906 to 1910.

Dr. Belloc wrote on a vast range of subjects, from warfare to poetry to history to current affairs. He ranks among the "Big Four" of Edwardian Letters, along with the free-thinker H. G. Wells, the atheist George Bernard Shaw, and the traditional Catholic G. K. Chesterton. His Catholic faith had a strong impact on his works, and his vision into the heart of Catholic history is incisive and succinct. The year just past has proven him a great prophet, unheeded in his day and desperately needed now, as his vision of the future is played out in Europe and America.

That vision is contained in Dr. Belloc's 1938 book The Great Heresies, in which he saw almost a century ahead into the current day. He was convinced that Europe and America had forgotten about Islam to their own peril, and were unaware that the Muslim religion could rise again and pose perhaps the greatest threat of any enemy of the Western World. "It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable," he wrote in 1938, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."

In the chapter titled "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed", he predicted the re-emergence of Islam as a global force and unparalleled foe of Christian civilization. "Less than a hundred years before the American War of Independence," he wrote, "a Mohammedan army was threatening to overrun and destroy Christian civilization." Thus there was no reason to think that Islam would not return to its former power, to become once again "the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had... as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past."

Dr. Belloc saw in his own time what is even more true nearly a century later, that European Christianity had sold out to "temporal things". He wrote, "There is no reason whatever why [Islam] should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it -- whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it."

And that's exactly what has happened. We have turned our backs on the Christian Faith that made the Western world strong. Meanwhile, the Muslims grow ever stronger, ever more fanatic, in their false and heretical religion. And, following the commands of Mohammed and the Holy Qu'ran, they are waging jihad -- holy war -- in our own lands.

They do not send whole armies against us, as they did centuries ago. Instead, they infiltrate our countries disguised as refugees and asylum-seekers, to wreak havoc, take over our cities and destroy us and our way of life. And what do we do? Welcome them with open arms! Surely it's time we heeded the warnings given to us by Hilaire Belloc, Enoch Powell, Charles de Gaulle and others who God blessed with the ability to look into the future.

Click here to read the meta-book version of The Great Heresies, courtesy of EWTN and Carnegie Mellon University. If you want to skip the Arians, Albigensians and Lutherans, click here to go straight to "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed".

7 famous people you probably didn't know were Catholic

Obi-Wan Kenobi?! Jedi knights are secret Catholics? Well, no... but Sir Alec Guinness, who portrayed Obi-Wan in the first of the Star Wars trilogies, was a devout Catholic, confirmed in the Church on 24 March 1956.

The Fathers [or Father? Ed.] who write the Traditio blog, from which the following list was taken, tell us that Sir Alec was not a "cradle Catholic", and was actually known for his anti-clericalism and anti-Romanism. But something happened to him during the filming in France, in 1954, of Father Brown, the story of a priest-detective based on the books of Catholic author G.K. Chesterton -- a favourite of Walt's Agent 9.

In his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise,  Sir Alec writes "By the time dusk fell, I was bored and, dressed in my priestly black, I climbed the gritty winding road to the village.... I hadn't gone far when I heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, 'Mon père!' My hand was seized by a boy of seven or eight, who clutched it tightly, swung it and kept up a non-stop prattle.... Although I was a total stranger, he obviously took me for a priest and so to be trusted. Suddenly with a 'Bonsoir, mon père,' and a hurried sideways sort of bow, he disappeared through a hole in the hedge.... Continuing my walk I reflected that a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creeping as so often made out [in Britain]. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed, prejudices [against Roman Catholicism]."

What eventually made Sir Alec Guinness decide, two years later, to convert to the True Faith was a miracle and a "personal encounter" with God. His only child Matthew contracted polio at the age of 11 and was at risk of dying. Sir Alec began visiting a Catholic church and prayed that if his son survived, he and his family would join the Catholic Church. His prayers were answered, and his son recovered from the almost-fatal illness. Sir Alec was as good as his word, and fulfilled his vow. From 1956 until the day he died at age 86 in 2000, he remained a traditional Catholic. A year after he converted, his wife followed him, and his son also joined the Church and was sent to a Jesuit school.

According to Traditio, other noted converts to traditional Catholicism have been:
* Actor Gary Cooper
* Actor Vincent Price
* Actor John Wayne, on his deathbed
* Irish playwright and confirmed bachelor Oscar Wilde, who made a Sacramental Confession and received Extreme Unction
* Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who had been baptized as a baby, but had fallen from the Faith; he called for a priest and received Extreme Unction on his deathbed
and... believe it or not...
* George Washington -- yes, the George Washington -- who, although known to be a Freemason, was probably baptized on his deathbed by a Jesuit priest from the church across the river, which the President had been known to slip into, on occasion, to hear Holy Mass.

Walt notes with sadness that the Catholic Church into which these seven famous people were received was not the so-called Catholic Church which we know today. It was the traditional, pre-Vatican II Church, that cherished and taught the Faith of our Fathers, the truths taught to us by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, when he walked among us. Nowadays, the true Catholic Faith is to be found not in the Vatican, but in the minds and hearts of the remnant of traditional Catholic bishops, priests and laypeople, who may well pray that Pope Francis may experience a similar conversion -- the sooner the better.

Prof calls new ON sex ed curriculum "lethal for the health of society"

Another voice has been raised against the LGBT-positive sex education curriculum being forced on the people of Ontario by that province's Liberal government and its lesbian Premier Kathleen Wynne. In "Why the Critics of the Ontario Sex-Ed Curriculum are Right" Professor Scott Masson, of Tyndale College in Toronto, argues that the new sex-ed curriculum vastly expands the teaching role of the state at the expense of parental authority.

Prof. Masson accuses the new curriculum of promoting a libertine attitude toward adolescent sex, which is lethal for the health of any society. From the beginning of the disciplines of anthropology and sociology up to now, he says, studies have concluded time and again that societies thrive to the extent that they nurture sexual restraint and monogamous marriage.

Here are some of the very strong points made by Prof. Masson, with emphasis by Walt.

The critics of this curriculum are right because it is nothing other than an experiment on their children by the children of the sexual revolution. Without any consideration for love or marriage - there is nary a mention of either in this infamous 244 page document - it speaks of sex in the anodyne consumerist terms of choice, of sex without moral, religious or societal consequences.

It is the teaching not of a just society, but of a perverted individualism that separates children not only from the values of the parents that bore, love and nurture them, but the idea that they too will one day be responsible for children when this government and its philosopher-kings lie on the ash heap of history.

At least since Plato, philosophers have argued that parents are naturally unfit to educate their children. In an ideal state, philosopher-kings such as he ought to usurp their role. Plato had no children. But the enlightened Rousseau, whose ideas ground modern educational theory, was so enamoured with the idea of the state’s responsibility in administering social justice, and in absolving himself of parental responsibility, that he placed the five children he conceived out of wedlock in state orphanages.

In his 1935 BBC radio debate with another statist educator, philosopher Bertrand Russell, G.K. Chesterton wryly retorted what every reasonable person recognizes. The immoral example of exceptional men like Rousseau proves the rule: Parents are by nature best positioned to bring up their children. They don’t raise themselves.

In the United Nations' declaration on Rights of the Child (1959), parents were declared to have primary responsibility in educating their children. The declaration was meant to set a hedge of protection for families against the totalitarian impulse of philosopher-kings.

Cambridge anthropologist J.D. Unwin's monumental work Sex and Culture (1934) studied 80 primitive tribes and six known civilizations over 5000 years of history. It strongly correlated the success of a civilization to the degree of sexual restraint it observed. "Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation."

The life or death of a civilization, which is at stake in the Christian teaching of natural sexual monogamy [argues] in favour of teaching that monogamy [is] essential to the health of the individual and to creating a more just society.

[Chesterton and Russell debated] the age-old question of which adults, which individuals capable of moral responsibility, were fit to do the task of creating a just society. Was it parents in the natural family unit, or the experts, the philosopher-kings?

This brings us to the Ontario sexual education curriculum, whose convictions on human sexual health are not liberating but deleterious. Once again, the debate lies between parental and state jurisdiction in creating a just society. But at the heart of the Ontario sex-ed curriculum is buried the perverse claim that children raise themselves.

This is explicit from the very outset of the curriculum, which commences with the teaching of consent to six-year-olds. To teach children what consent means, even in the rudimentary terms the premier gives of “reading facial expressions and emotions,” is to assume that they have the capacity for moral responsibility to exercise it. This is why the legal age of consent is connected to the moral responsibility of adults.... [Yet] by six, the human eye has not even fully developed.

"Consent" is...to be understood in the cultural Marxist terms of autonomous sexual freedom, and even sexual identity. They are the terms of men from Herbert Marcuse to Michel Foucault, the favourites of the philosopher-kings of our day, whose autonomy is declared precisely against the natural family.

It must not be imposed on the only people whose consent is required, the parents of children in Ontario.

In case you missed it: "VIDEO: What's really in Ontario's new sex ed curriculum", explained by Ezra Levant