Of Arts and the Animal part 2

 A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

The divine simplicity contains in itself all complexities. The creature does not represent God merely in a generic sense, the richness of the divine perfection is such that it is not exhausted although every creature ever created communicates unique aspects of the divine essence in the very haeccitas that constitutes it an individual creature distinct from all others. This is true of you and me and the tree on the corner; whilst, unlike her Calcutta cousin, the Lord’s pavilion cat makes no claim to be divine, she is shot through with divinity in every aspect of her being and dwells ever in the divine presence, sharing with the redeemed in the ‘liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom VIII). Furthermore, she and the Mountains of Mourne, as words of God entirely contained within the Eternal Word, find their place at the heart of our faith as we kneel before the Eucharistic presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

What does all of this mean for us, who stand within the created order as the audience God has created for the communication He offers in His creation? To start with it enables us to find our place in the world, to orientate ourselves, which means to know where we stand in relation to Christ the Oriens, “O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae: veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis”. O Dayspring splendour of eternal light and sun of justice come and enlighten those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death (commemoration at 2^nd Vespers of St Thomas 21 Dec).

We begin by acknowledging that we are by nature utterly dependent upon the things of this world and see that this dependency is a sacramental symbol of the manner in which we are sustained by our Creator and theirs. We receive from Him not only that which makes our way of life possible, our daily bread, but that life itself, our human nature, and our existence.

The first consideration arising from this is that in our limitations and our dependence upon the divine bounty for all that we are and all that we need we are truly very nearly nothing at all; each of us is but a little gobbet of something delineated against the world (and still more, against a nothingness we can hardly imagine, but into which all creation would resolve itself were it not subject to God’s constant care). The second consideration is of the divine fruitfulness from which we have received and continue to receive all things, on which account we may be confident that we shall continue to receive still further blessings as we take our place in the reception and communication of the divine goodness. Turning from the dogmatic to the ascetic, we learn from St Bonaventure’s great work on the spiritual life the Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, that meditation upon these twin considerations is the highest form of prayerful contemplation because by enabling those who would reflect upon the attributes of God to understand this world of creatures, their own environment, in terms of the action and manifestation of the divine goodness, this ‘cherubic meditation’ allows them to see and to relate to God in all things and through all things, dwelling (like Puss) always in His presence until, finding Him in themselves and themselves in Him, they may reach the heights of a mystic union with God that goes beyond all conscious thought and holds them even in this life as close to the throne of heaven as the seraphim. The life of St Francis was spent in precisely this meditation upon the divine seen through the natural; “led by the footprints he found in creatures he followed the Beloved everywhere” (Vita St. Francis by St. Bonaventure quoted in St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists). It is this reflection upon the divine bounty and the contingent nature of our existence that gives meaning to the evangelical counsel of poverty, enabling those of us who are not monks or friars to share in the spirit of their vows, developing a sense of detachment from that which belongs to the divine bounty so that it serves us in its usefulness rather than have us serve it in our vanity – the liturgy gives us St Dominic for our example as it speaks of his crossing the wave of vanity in the ark of poverty for the welfare of the people. “In fiscella paupertatis flumen transit vanitatis, pro salute populi” (Dominican Missal).

            The prerequisites for such a meditation are, clearly, that one should be able to appreciate one’s own utter dependence upon the gifts of the divine bounty given through the natural world rather than believing in a mythical self-sufficiency of technological progress; and also the possibility of relating to our fellow creatures of every species in a direct, personal and unmediated fashion in order to receive the divine self-communication in them rather than simply to reinforce an artificial narrative derived from our own intellectual constructs. I will leave it to you to decide how far our media culture militates against the fulfilment of these prerequisites and move on to my next point.

To be continued...

By Prayer Crusader St Philip Howard

Of Arts and the Animal - Part One

 A Christian Essay in Aesthetic Value

 Aesthetics is the science of beauty and the arts, which are generally regarded as utterly trivial matters. If people have anything at all to say on the subject it is usually to deny the importance, or even the possibility, of making aesthetic judgements: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “to each his own”. I would, however, contend that a theological appreciation of the nature of art allows us to grasp that the arts are at the centre of the human vocation; and that a philosophical understanding of the purpose of art enables us to see that aesthetic judgements are not merely possible but spiritually and intellectually essential. The television question must be viewed in this light.

To begin at the beginning: Animals and the environment are media staples and subjects of popular discussion, and they have already made an appearance in the CUT Newsletter, but further examination is necessary for people to understand that they are in many ways key to our concerns.

What is a creature? It is that which God has created, an expression of the divine creativity brought into being by the divine will; it is a word of God spoken into the cosmos of His creation to be received by the audience He creates within the cosmic whole, by which I mean us. It is a communication, a self-revelation of the divine by which God makes Himself known to us, and not only to us, but in us and through us. It is a semantic unit irreducibly complex in its totality, whatever strands of meaning might be discerned within it; the rabbit is more than the sum of his ears and whiskers.

Whilst God certainly addresses us through His creation, He does not do so in a simple manner, which is to say that He does not, like a Laputan professor, present us with things for want of any spoken or written language with which to represent them. Rather, in the act of the creation, of communication or expression, the created order in which we are born is drawn into the circumincessionary heart of the Most Blessed Trinity, into the intimacy of the Godhead: it is not that a creature is given to us instead of the word that might represent it, but that it itself is the word by which God represents that which is of Himself. The creature we see makes present to us in the concrete that which in the ideal is found perfect in the ever-fruitful goodness of God. It is a word spoken into, and contained within, the Word in which all things are created in the reflection of the Father in the Son (Col. 1, 16:19) and expressed into the created order through the power of the will to action, the desire, the love that, proceeding from the Father through the Son, is the Holy Ghost. It makes manifest that the absolute good reflected in the absolute good is not self-contained in goodness, that God is not limited by His own completeness-in Himself, but is absolute in fruitfulness, for to be good is to wish to communicate goodness. The divine simplicity contains in itself all complexities. The creature does not represent God merely in a generic sense, the richness of the divine perfection is such that it is not exhausted although every creature ever created communicates unique aspects of the divine essence in the very haeccitas that constitutes it an individual creature distinct from all others. This is true of you and me and the tree on the corner; whilst, unlike her Calcutta cousin, the Lord’s pavilion cat makes no claim to be divine, she is shot through with divinity in every aspect of her being and dwells ever in the divine presence, sharing with the redeemed in the ‘liberty of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom VIII). Furthermore, she and the Mountains of Mourne, as words of God entirely contained within the Eternal Word, find their place at the heart of our faith as we kneel before the Eucharistic presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

Spiritual Combat and the Prayer Crusader

 

Spiritual combat

 

The Catholic Truth Society (CTS) has recently published a booklet called Spiritual Combat according to St. Benedict. Raphael’s painting of St. Michael overcoming the devil appears on the cover. All CUT members are asked to be prayer crusaders, and all are familiar with the image of St. Michael, sword or spear in hand, triumphing over a fallen and sprawling Satan. Each of us has our own chosen Saint or Blessed who fights alongside us, with reference in particular to satanic influence over the media and the entertainment industry. This booklet, written by a French Benedictine monk, explains how such spiritual combat must be undertaken. 

 Father Bernard identifies three “breaches” in the integrity of the soul, through which Satan can attempt an entrance in order to disrupt and weaken the spiritual life of each human person. The “breaches” he also calls “wounds”, areas of weakness and vulnerability. All three breaches (unless closely watched and strongly defended) allow Satan to seize on and distort desires which are in themselves natural and indeed essential to human nature and human living.

 The first breach relates to the need for well-being, for pleasure and security in such things as food, shelter, comfort and sexual relationships. In his encounter with our Lord in the desert, Satan tried to exploit this breach when he tempted our Lord to create bread for himself after his forty days’ fast.

 The second breach relates to the natural human desire to be recognised, loved and approved, - in early life by parents, later by wider family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours and those with whom we share a culture. Thus we form and develop relationships of love and positive regard whereby we support and are supported by others. Satan seeks to twist this into a desire to be admired and held in high esteem for our own dubious profit and benefit. Satan suggested to Jesus that he throw himself down from the highest pinnacle of the temple in order to gain the acclaim of crowds of people who would see the angels coming to save him from harm.

 There is a human need to create, to plan and to organise. This is at the root of all human endeavour, from making a shopping list to designing a cathedral. The breach which Satan here seeks to exploit is the need for control, for power, for domination. He showed Jesus the whole world, spread out around and below a high mountain: “All this can be yours” he said,  but Jesus again rejected the temptation.

 Spiritual combat consists in discerning the perversions that Satan is attempting to work in us, and indeed has already worked to some extent, and in redirecting our desires to God and to the unselfish love of the people around us.

 In the second half of the booklet, Father Bernard examines factors which make spiritual combat more difficult for us. The influence of the culture in which we live, and of negative incidents in individual lives, can weaken the soul’s ability to discern what Satan is doing in the soul. Father Bernard goes on to consider the nature of Satan, the Adversary, the Divider, himself. He “deceives, worries, divides, separates from God and others...” and “divides the heart against itself”. Within many areas of life, Satan does little, since he need only “complacently watch the agents acting on his behalf”, among whom, as prayer crusaders know, are those dominating the mainstream media, the entertainment industry, and huge swathes of the internet. Among monks, however (the author himself having been a monk and indeed Abbot of his community for twenty years), these “agents” can make little headway, so Satan sends “a hundred devils” to tempt the monks in far more subtle ways. Since prayer crusaders often live lives withdrawn from the more obvious occasions of sin and are readily on their guard against the temptations of mainstream culture, they may perhaps be compared to monks and need to be prepared to search for satanic influence hidden in unsuspected areas of their lives. Essentially, spiritual combat is conducted in each individual heart, where lie “the roots of doubt, despair, indifference, violence or hatred”. Satan can only enter from outside, and may reach deeply into the individual, but it is possible (often with another’s help) to discern which breach he entered by. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, operates in the depths of the heart where “his peaceful action pacifies, purifies, enlightens and builds up”.

 Spiritual combat is carried out by means of prayer, the sacraments (especially the sacrament of penance), works of charity, and contemplation.         

 Father Bernard quotes several times from Saint Augustine, and also from Venerable Madeleine Delbrel.

By Prayer Crusader St Thersea of Avila 

unvaccinated are not the problem

 The Perfect Covid Storm

Covid 19 or the China virus as some call it has been among us now for nearly two years with no sign of it ending. In fact it may have started in China around the time of the Pachamama shame episode at the Vatican - Pope Francis take note and perhaps a procession of reparation around the Vatican is needed to ask God's forgiveness.

 If vaccines are working, then why are they not working?

And yet we were led to believe that vaccination would end this pandemic. However, now it's the vaccinated who are catching and spreading the disease and since August 91% of Covid-19 deaths have been among the fully vaccinated, reports the Expose website. Yes, there are a disproportionate number of the un-vaccinated in hospital but not the majority, for they are the vaccinated.

 Experts call these breakthrough infections with those who are vaccinated actually getting Covid - why? Are we in fact causing a perfect Covid Storm and the vaccine is causing a spike in Coronavirus protein leading to mutations of the virus and death: we ask the question, is this because of vaccinations? Again, it's the left/liberal Main Stream Media (MSM) that is not only causing panic they are ignoring the dangers of the vaccine that can cause blood clots and heart problems. They ignore the fact that amongst professional footballers two major stars have had their career ended by heart problems that happened after taking the jab, of course the MSM and medical world are disparaging this fact and yet heart problems and deaths are much higher in younger athletic men than before the vaccine. In fact there is a spike in deaths in young men that cannot be explained.

 Those pushing the vaccine with an almost totalitarian zeal are beginning to use the rhetoric of the 1930s against the unvaccinated. Tony Blair, (he who took us to war under false pretences in the Middle East and stirred up an Islamist hornets' nest in the process) call the unvaccinated "irresponsible idiots". The arch-heretic-"bishop" of Canterbury (who has let paedophiles run riot in his cathedral) said it is "immoral" not to have the jab and that Jesus would have had it - to that I say you are talking rubbish, your reverend! Lawyers for the sex abused victim say "Archbishop" Welby must face disciplinary action.

 Being vaccinated does not turn you into supermen.

Yet it is the unvaccinated who still get the blame, the unvaccinated being victimised by society. Are they really in fact the innocent victims of the Covid- spreading vaccinated? Just because you are vaccinated you can now join the huge crowds at football matches, raves and night clubs - where ahhh ... they spread Covid among the other vaccinated. And according to the idiot PM of New Zealand take part in orgies. You may think that my associating the jab pushers with Nazis is a bit OTT; take a look at Australia who are actually building concentration camps and putting the unvaccinated in them - have we learnt nothing?

 The Vatican under this arch heretic pope Pachapapa Francis (I am so ecumenical), are sacking people who do not have the vaccine, such a Christian thing to do. Perhaps those poor people who have lost their jobs should be grateful that they will not have to mingle with the vaccinated, you never know who the real spreaders are. At the moment the full force of the authorities and the media point the finger only at the unvaccinated.

 Why are the most vaccinated countries having the most cases of Covid?

Countries with high vaccinated proportions of their populations are proud of their efforts and are looking to push it to other lower vaccinated counties. However, people with one two or three jabs are getting Covid and passing the virus on. Israel is now on its fourth jab, and called by Yahoo news the "Ultra-Vaxxed" have major Covid crisis on their hands. Why are the countries with lower vaccine rates getting lower Covid rates?

 Is catching omicron less dangerous than having the vaccine?

Although the Delta variant is still around the most common is now the Omicron, which spreads quicker but is less dangerous. Therefore, is it better to get Omicron than to have the vaccine? The inventor, yes INVENTOR! of the mRNA "Vaccine" Dr Robert Malone has gone on record as saying young children should NOT be given this treatment as it is not actually a vaccine at all but gene therapy. However, the good doctor has been flung off twitter and the media in general will not report on him.

 I'm not against vaccines

I'm not against vaccines so no one can label me an anti-vaxxer but I will never have a jab that has been tainted by an abortion either in its testing phase or actually having been made using foetal cells. Therefore, none of the current vaccines are ethical for a Catholic to take, forget the vaxx fanatics who say it's an act of love to do so - rubbish! It's the vaccinated who are passing on the virus so that argument falls flat on its face.

 Yes, it's the irresponsible actions of the vaccinated that are spreading Covid and the unvaccinated are the victims in more ways than one.

By Prayer Crusader St Philomena

Pope Ozymandias

 

Prayer Crusader St Cecilia writes:

It is astonishing what you discover browsing in the highways and byways of English literature. Who knew that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley forecast the disastrous results of Padre Bergoglio’s papacy over two hundred years ago? I refer to his sonnet misleadingly entitled ‘Ozymandias’:

 

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Stamped on these lifeless things, the hates, the hopes,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Père Bergoglio, Pope of Popes:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Shelley might have been a notorious atheist but self-evidently he had more foresight than a certain pope I could name!

 

Twix Holloween ad

 The Woke of the Devil

Last Easter we had Cadburys crème Eggs ad where two homosexual men dance about in a garden, one taking a crème Egg and put it in his mouth, the other then bit the other half, and the gooey sickly internal goo trailed between them as they parted. Now we have Twix, a double chocolate bar employing LGBT themes in a Halloween themed ad.

This Twix ad is not only callous and occult themed involving a young boy dressed as a girl, a black clad witch and what looks the supernatural murder of another young boy. So here we have an ad for a chocolate bar that doesn't mention ... ah the chocolate bar at all, just a small logo at the end. A boy of about seven is playing in a princess dress when he is visited by his new nanny, a black clad black lipsticked witch! They go for a walk and the boy in the dress is taunted by another boy for wearing the dress. "Hey you, you look like a girl, why are you wearing that." The witch nanny then summons up her magic power and murders the taunting boy. Yes, she blows him away.

Children who watch TV and are not homeschooled these days are at risk, at risk of being abused, at risk of being brainwashed, at risk of being socially engineered into being either homosexual or wanting to "change" their sex. The situation is so serious that one in three teens have an LGBT mental illness; a survey has shown that 35% of 14-19 year olds want to change sex and 13% think they are homosexual. Source: NHS Digital.

It is vital for the future of young people today that parents protect them from the media and keep them at home and homeschool them. During the Covid pandemic parents became alarmed for they had access through Zoom to what their children are actually being taught - and it’s very Woke and evil. The Woke of the Devil. In fact all Woke is of the Devil.

Prayer Crusader St Philomena

The 'Vaccine' and the Irish bishops part 4

 Another treatment offered by medical professionals is ivermectin

Drs Paul Marik and Pierre Kory founders of the group Front line covid critical care alliance (FLCCC alliance) have been promoting ivermectin which is normally used for parasite infestations of the body. They have been having promising results with this drug.

 Marik “the Eastern Virginia Medical School professor and doctor goes on to review four clinical studies (also chronicled by TrialSite) including Mahmud, Rajter, Kahn, and Gorial and performs what he describes as a “meta-analysis” with mortality as an endpoint. He argues that the results indicate a “highly significant reduction in mortality.” Trialsite news

           Last month Dr. Kory and his team testified before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee in favour of authorizing ivermectin, a Nobel Prize–winning  anti-parasitic agent, for early treatment of the novel coronavirus.  In his impassioned presentation, Dr. Kory explained that ivermectin “basically obliterates transmission of this virus,” with “miraculous effectiveness.”

Ivermectin has been the subject of dozens of studies and anecdotal success stories since it was found to reduce COVID-19 in a laboratory last June.

          “I've been treating COVID pretty much every single day since the onset,” Kory said at the December hearing.

“When I say ‘miracle’ I do not use that term lightly[.] ... [T]hat is a scientific recommendation based on mountains of data that has emerged in the last three months.”

 

Such data emanates from places like India, the second most populated nation in the world, which embraced the treatment protocol advanced by FLCCC, and has watched its case and fatalities rate drop in “steep decline.”  Though India has four times the population of the U.S., it has less than half of the coronavirus related deaths.  Source LSN

              According to Dr Ryan Cole, Medical Director of Cole Labs, who says, four billion doses of Ivermectin have safely been taken. With Ivermectin the death rate decreased 70-90% in hospitals treating COVID-19 patients.

              The American National institute of health (NIH) has been implacably against this drug. One wonders why?              

Remdesivir another drug on the market shows effectiveness against sars-cov2, the New England journal of medicine reports on trials of Remdesivir shows that it was better than placebo and shortened hospitalization time and also reduced respiratory tract infections.

             The Medical Express reports on a 31 year old man who was quite ill with a rare genetic disorder which prevented him from creating immune antibodies and contracted the sars-cov2:

             “Dr. Nicholas Matheson from the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID) at the University of Cambridge added: "Our patient's unusual condition gave us a rare insight into the effectiveness of remdesivir as a treatment for coronavirus infection. The dramatic response to the drug—on repeated challenge—suggests that it can be a highly effective treatment, at least for some patients."

 

The team further suspect that remdesvir is likely to be most beneficial when administered early in infection, before the virus is able to trigger a potentially catastrophic immune response. They say that the course of their patient's disease also underscores the important—but often conflicting—roles that antibodies play in protecting us from infection.

 

"The fact that our patient was unable to fight off the disease without treatment suggests that antibodies contribute to the control of SARS-CoV-2," explained Dr. Matthew Buckland from the Department of Clinical Immunology, Barts Health, London. "But this lack of antibodies may also have prevented his COVID-19 from becoming life-threatening, because he had no antibodies to trigger a damaging immune response.”

 

             Prelimininary tests by Gilead the drug manufacturers have shown in a phase three simple trial, “Among severely sick people, the antiviral drug reduced the risk of dying by 62 percent compared with standard care,”

        Which of course requires to be confirmed in clinical trials.

         Other trials have found the same results such as that among severely sick people, the antiviral drug reduced the risk of dying by 62% compared with standard care,

                 Dr Kathleen Mullane of Chicago university, an infectious disease specialist, has said good things about it. On studies she has done on it she has stated that most of the patients under her care were severely ill with sars-cov2 but with treatment with the drug they were able to go home within six days and only two had died.

                   Remdesivir has also shown good results in many animal studies and shown that it can prevent and treat sars-cov-2, and mers.

                   One wonders why the WHO have said they do not recommend this drug.

                    Tocilizumab has also shown promising results especially in people who are in the severely ill category. In one trial in India one doctor had this to say,

            “The trial's lead co-author, Professor A. V. Ramanan from the University of Bristol's School of Clinical Sciences, and Consultant Paediatric Rheumatologist at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, said: "Our study suggests tocilizumab might still be effective in patients with severe COVID-19 and so should be investigated further in future studies. It adds to existing evidence from the RECOVERY and REMAP-CAP studies which demonstrate that tocilizumab does have a significant impact on reducing mortality in those with COVID-19 requiring oxygen or being ventilated. After dexamethasone (steroids), this is still the most significant advance in the treatment of COVID that has an impact in reducing deaths." Source (Medical Express March 8^th 2021)

   There are also ongoing trials with many other drugs that have not used murdered babies to obtain them.

Why would the relevant Government agencies be downplaying the potency of these very apt medicines and nature’s own immunity and healing properties? Might it have something to do with the fact that these agencies cannot legally allow on to the market an experimental vaccine where there is already a known treatment.

Hence the response to the Vatican statement where it states: “Therefore, doctors and fathers of families have a duty to take recourse to alternative vaccines… there is a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines.”  This is not being adhered to and also falls at this fence.

Conscience

The recent statement from the Vatican following on from the 2005 statement states,

         “Due to the situation of the ongoing pandemic, “all vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive.”

In assessing the ethics and the morality of a vaccine one criterion is whether the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease? Well I must say personally I have not the slightest fear of the novel coronavirus. Let’s take a look.  Surely one should weigh up the matter. Bishop Doran, you may have been influenced by Pope Francis when he said “we must take the vaccine. “ When he was interviewed on the Italian news media he said,

        "If the doctors are presenting this to you as a thing that will go well and doesn't have any special dangers, why not take it?"

        These are serious words coming from the pope, one wonders if he has done any research.