Thursday 28 August 2014

St Catherine of Siena

 

‘Homosexuals cause Nausea to Our Lord’

 


St Catherine of Siena
Wikipedia


Whenever we may become concerned that we are perhaps being a little too strong in our warnings about the media and its support of homosexuality we must turn to Sacred Scripture, the teachings of the Church and her saints. There we will find courage to keep up the fight but we must always do this out of charity for as St Paul says ‘If I should have prophecy and should know all mysteries and all knowledge and if I should have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing’ (1 Cor 13:2). We believe that warning against media promoted homosexuality is a great charity, an act of love for homosexuals and the people affected by the media.

 

               The great saint and doctor of the Church, St Catherine of Siena, was not afraid to exercise this work of charity towards homosexuals. For she was a mystic to whom Our Lord appeared and said :

 

“They [the homosexuals] not only fail from resisting the weakness [of fallen human nature] …. but they do even worse when they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes Me nausea, but is disgusting even to the devils themselves whom these depraved creatures have chosen as their lords.

         For Me this sin against nature is so abominable that for it alone five cities were destroyed by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear their iniquity …. It is disgusting to the devils not because evil displeases them or because they find pleasure in good, but rather because their nature is angelic and flees upon seeing such a repulsive sin being committed. For while certainly it is the devil that first strikes the sinner with the poisoned arrow of concupiscence, nonetheless when a man actually carries out such a sinful act, the devil goes away.”

This is pretty strong stuff, but remember who is saying it, not St Catherine but Jesus himself. The Jesus in the New Testament didn’t mince his words either, using language such as hypocrites, and brood of vipers and whited sepulchres outside but inwardly all full of dead men’s bones and all filthiness, to the Pharisees. Some would like to paint the orthodox Catholic as the Pharisee of today but they would be wrong: the Pharisees and Sadducees of today are those who teach the new secular law – the politicians and the Militant Secularists in the media.

Friday 22 August 2014

The BBC and ISIS

Is the BBC radicalising British Muslims?

How the BBC do a ‘better’ job at radicalising young British Muslims than any radical preacher

Before you say, ‘he can’t blame the BBC for this, I would have thought the opposite would be the case’, let us first look at what is happening to ordinary orthodox Catholics because of the Media led BBC.
It is becoming increasingly difficult for Christians to work in the Main Stream Media (MSM). Or should I say, for Christians who follow the teachings of Sacred Scripture and the traditions of the Church to work there. Perhaps fewer are doing so of late, but we still exist. If Christians are prepared to pay lip service to - or indeed actively dissent from - Church teaching, they are welcomed, even championed, by the politically correct media establishment. On the other hand, if you say: No; abortion, sodomy, contraception, euthanasia etc. go against the teaching of the Church and you cannot accept them, you will be labelled a bigot or a nutcase. There is no longer any tolerance for traditional Christian moral teachings. You go along with the secular flow, or you shut up, or you will not be employed. And all forms of employment are following the MSM’s lead, e.g.  midwives, social workers, etc., even B & B owners find it impossible to earn a living unless they accept the new ‘norm’.
               The politically correct world of the MSM is not a world that tolerates either the masculine or the feminine. The female must become more masculine and the male must be more female or at the very least be neutered. Hence the consistent vilification of the Catholic Church by the media, in particular the fanatically Politically Correct BBC. We have after all a male hierarchy; we accept the male and the female as God created us. We have Our Lady and hundreds of female saints but these are not role models that are acceptable to the MSM. You won’t get the BBC making a documentary about St. Margaret Clitherow or Bl. Mother Teresa unless it is to attempt to undermine them.
               Consistently the BBC uses its sports radio channel Radio 5 Live, whose audience is overwhelmingly male, to push a feminist and homosexual agenda. This is where you will most often find the militant secular brainwashing used against anyone who still dares to stand up for the traditional understanding of male or female. The world of sport is the final frontier of the broadcast world - well almost. Even the BBC Songs of Praise are considering a ‘Gay’ Christian singer songwriter as a presenter. I heard a Radio 5 Live interviewer being very positive to this singer. Once sport and its predominantly male audience are conquered, Christianity will be the next target.

               If Catholics become so disenchanted with the Main Stream Media that they feel they need to take the radical step of throwing away the TV in order to maintain a sense of loyalty to their faith, then what about Muslims? Do they throw the TV out when explicit immorality, either of images or sentiment, is beamed directly into their front rooms? Or do they find another way?  After all, the Muslim faith is not attacked in the same way as the Catholic faith is. It could even be said that the MSM media portrays the Muslim faith in a positive way, depicting Islam as the victim of Christianity.  For example, documentaries and films are not made about the Muslim conquest of Christian lands, but the Christian response to the Muslim conquest, namely ‘The Crusades’ is acknowledged, and portrayed in a negative way. If, because of the media, even Christians believe that the Crusades were nothing more than a brutal and unprovoked attack against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world, then what are Muslims led to believe?
               So perhaps because of the BBC we should not be surprised that so many British Muslims are fighting for Islamic State (formerly ISIS).  A report recently said that there are about 500. Could it be that the immorality of the MSN on the one hand, and the persistent attacks of the BBC on orthodox Christianity (and in particular Catholicism) on the other, have combined to promote the radicalisation of young Western Muslims? It is a desperately sad fact that it was a British Muslim who executed the American photo journalist last week and recorded the execution using High Definition equipment; then used social media to terrorise western viewers with this horror porn of their own.


Friday 15 August 2014

Children and TV

Children and TV
By Dr Joseph Shaw

I recently took my two oldest children, aged ten and eight, to see a Shakespeare play in Stratford on Avon. We were greeted with incredulity wherever we went. One of the theatre employees remarked that his own children didn’t have the attention span to watch a whole episode of Neighbours. That struck me as a revealing remark.
               The world created by television is an adult world, not because it is profound, but because it is shallow. There is more wisdom in a Victorian fairy story than in twenty episodes of a soap opera.  There is a more sophisticated vocabulary, a wider range of styles, and even an appreciation of more different cultures. In reading The Blue Fairy Book or Treasure Island to my children, I was consulting dictionaries, maps, and Wikipedia to keep up. But children are content to understand things at their own level, and to fit what they don’t know in with what they do.
               Indeed this true of everyone’s appreciation of what is genuinely profound in literature or art. We don’t understand it all; we don’t suck it dry; we take from a parable of Jesus, or a great painting, something, not everything; perhaps something we need at that moment. We needn’t be afraid of children having the same experience. Simple art and simple stories need not lack depth, but what is presented on the TV nearly always does. TV producers need to feed the short attention-spans they have created, and they are prisoners of a conception of human life which lacks a spiritual dimension, and sometimes even an emotional one. Which came first, a medium which creates passivity, or a world view which assigns value only to pleasurable sensations? It would seem they have grown up together.
I’m unable to do a ‘before and after’ study of my children with TV, because we haven’t had broadcast TV since before the oldest was able to watch it. My children have watched DVDs: their favourite is a 30-minute animated version of Mozart’s Magic Flute made by Welsh TV, followed by The Taming of the Shrew in the same series. But while there are advantages to them knowing what moving pictures look like (they aren’t instantly mesmerised when they see them in a friend’s house), it is true to say that the telly doesn’t play a significant part in their lives.
               What do they do all day? Chesterton remarked that it is perfectly possible to turn the clock back; it is just a matter of effort. In their free time my home-schooled children do the things children did fifty or a hundred years ago. They play; once they learn to read, they read. They play card games. They’ve just learnt to play draughts, and that has become quite a craze. Last Summer they discovered croquet; it was set up on the lawn and on fine days they’d be playing before breakfast. They aren’t especially precocious: they don’t actually understand Shakespeare plays without it being explained, and I can still beat them at chess. But they are having a childhood.

Dr Joseph Shaw is a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St Benet’s Hall, Oxford, he is the chairman of the Latin Mass Society and runs St Catherine’s Trust  http://stcatherinestrust.org/  which promotes Catholic education in accordance with the traditional teachings of the Church. He is a regular blogger on Traditional Catholic Issues. His latest series of blogs has caused quite a debate and explores what happens when religion is used for nationalist purposes. See To understand ISIS, look at Anglicanism To Understand ISIS, look at Anglicanism

Tuesday 5 August 2014

BBC license fee

The BBC and the license fee
The BBC’s charter is to be reviewed in 2016. The question of how the BBC should be funded will be one of the items under consideration. At present it is funded through the license fee, and everyone with a TV has to have a license, whether or not they actually watch any BBC programmes.
Mr. Ryan Bourne, at
addresses two blog posts put out by the BBC’s Director of Policy James Heath, who maintains that the license fee is the best way of funding the BBC, while direct subscription would be a worse option.
Mr. Bourne points out that when the license fee was established during the early post-war period, the broadcasting situation was very different from what it is now. He asks, “If the BBC did not already exist, would anyone today seriously suggest creating it?” He examines in detail the changes that have taken place in the broadcasting world during the past sixty or so years, concluding that almost everything which the BBC provides can be – and indeed is – now provided through commercial channels. One of the few exceptions is children’s television, as regulations make it impossible to place advertising on programmes aimed specifically at children.  Mr. Bourne points out that “There is nothing democratic about someone in the BBC deciding what to produce divorced from the wants and needs of customers – and it is vastly economically inefficient. In modern broadcasting, it is simply not necessary for one broadcaster to provide a full range of services”. He adds that “There is no real mechanism for consumers to hold the BBC to account for the quality and content of its output”.
The BBC’s charter requires it to provide news, information and comment with impartiality. Mr. Bourne feels that this is an impossible requirement for an organisation such as the BBC, when “all editorial decisions of what to cover and how to cover it entail partial judgments”. Indeed, he says “Everybody believes the BBC is biased against them (see Gaza coverage, the debates over welfare reform, discussion of the EU etc). We would never complain that the Guardian is biased because we know its broad worldview and can judge what it says against that”.
Mr. Bourne concludes that “The real unfairness of it is not that it costs poorer people a higher proportion of their incomes, it’s that there is absolutely no link between the amount you pay and the amount of BBC you are willing to pay for the option to watch - to the extent that you have to pay even if you want to watch no BBC television. This final point may not affect many people, but it seems to me an utterly indefensible principle.”
By the Prayer Crusader under the patronage of St Theresa of Avila