Video - Tres encíclicas y cuatro exhortaciones apostólicas constituyen el núcleo de la herencia que deja Benedicto XVI a modo de contribuciones decisivas a la explicación de la Verdad de Dios, de Cristo y de la Iglesia

Las lecciones del Papa profesor que pasarán a la Historia

Rien n’est définitif dans l’histoire des hommes, pas plus le tracé des frontières que les peuples qui s’abandonnent et doutent d’eux-mêmes

Quelques mots entre nous pour ceux 

qui aiment notre pays

Le Salon Beige

On me communique cette allocution 

du général Alexandre Lalanne-Berdouticq.

Remarquable :


"Alors que l'on détourne notre attention des vrais problèmes qui se posent aujourd'hui, je voudrais avec franc-parler remettre quelques notions à leur place et ouvrir des pistes de réflexion à ceux qui ne sont pas prisonniers des emballements médiatiques, à ceux pour lesquels le temps long cher à Fernand Braudel est plus important que le « court-termisme » à la mode aujourd'hui.

Que ceux qui croient que « penser c’est commencer à désobéir » ne lisent pas ces lignes car ils sont probablement mal outillés pour voir les choses telles qu'elles sont. En effet :

.................



En conclusion :

-Il nous faut chasser l’idéologie, quelle qu’elle soit ; de « droite » ou de « gauche ». C’est une maladie mortelle de l’esprit car elle fait voir la réalité au travers de systèmes d’idées, qui sont autant de lunettes déformantes.
A l’idéologie il faut opposer le principe de réalité qui veut queles choses soient ce quelles sont, que cela nous plaise ou non. Alors on peut agir en espérant ne pas trop se tromper. 

Il n’y a pas de bons camps de concentration (cubains, nord-coréens, chinois) dont on ne parle jamais, et de mauvais, les nazis, dont il faut sans cesse se souvenir. Il y a eu et il y a des camps de concentration où des innocents sont morts et meurent encore dans des conditions atroces. 

Il n’y a pas l’antisémitisme, évidemment condamnable, des « néonazis », et sa variété excusable, celle des « islamistes », qui est passé sous silence. Il y a l’antisémitisme (qui d’ailleurs est un antijudaïsme), un point c’est tout. 

Au nom de quoi devrait-on condamner « l’islamophobie » si l’on ne le fait pas de la « papohobie » ou de la « christianophobie » ? A-t-on vu un chrétien Chaldéen ou un Melchite se faire sauter dans une mosquée d’Irak ? Un seul ?

 Dès lors, comment mettre sur le même pied « les » intégrismes ? 

Il existe quand même une différence de nature entre un zélateur d’Al Quaeda et un Mormon, me semble-t-il. 

Distinguer souverainement le bien du mal, ne pas mettre à égalité le bon et le mauvais s’appelle aussi : Liberté.

.....Lire ici: lesalonbeige.blogs.com

The Jesuit educational maxim was, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Today’s progressives get children until they are 18 and sometimes 21. That kind of influence is hard to match.

Is Leftist School Indoctrination Unstoppable?

By Bruce Thornton

"The Gresham’s law of education..." 

Rush Limbaugh weighed in recently on the Republicans’ on-going debate about what went wrong in November. Elaborating on his earlier comment that he was “ashamed of America,” Limbaugh said, “The Left has beaten us. They have created far more low-information, unaware, uneducated people than we’ve been able to keep up with . . . I’ve always had a Civics 101 view of the country: People get what they want, they vote what they want, and they get the way they vote.” He added that the Democrats “control the education system . . . pop culture, movies, TV and books” and use that control to create “dependency” among voters.

Some may think this is a dog-bites-man observation, but it’s worth looking more closely at the most important item in Limbaugh’s list––the educational system. Everything else Limbaugh mentions is made possible because of the deep corruption in public education from kindergarten to university.

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Readn more: frontpagemag.com

A system of government must be able to demand loyalty and sacrifice, and it has to stand for enough good principles and good people to justify that

Catholicism Offers the U.S. 

a Vision of the Good Life

by James Kalb

American political institutions give us all part of the responsibility 

for how we are governed. Catholics need to carry out that responsibility

in accordance with their best understanding of man,

society, and American political life.

The Catholic understanding of man and society is reasonably well worked out, but the nature of American political life is ambiguous. Our institutions are republican by design, and based on limited and distributed powers. They are also democratic, and claim to reflect the will of the people. What’s needed to bring those two aspects together is mutual persuasion. If powers are limited and distributed, mutual persuasion is necessary for government to go forward, and if that is how decisions are made, they can reasonably be viewed as the considered judgment of the people.

That system seems a good one for carrying on public life in accordance with reason. For government to do something a great many people in different situations must be persuaded the action would be sensible. As described, though, the system is simply procedural. It says that a variety of people have to agree before something happens, but not what kind of people they are or what leads them to agree. It leaves uncertain what the point of the activity is.

Our foundational documents do not really settle the issue. The Preamble to the Constitution says that the goals of the “more perfect union” established by the Constitution are justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty. The First Amendment tells us that religion and the press have a protected though unofficial role, while other amendments protect property and privacy rights and show a tendency to broaden the popular element in government. And the Declaration of Independence says that we are all created equal and endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.................

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com

R.J. Snell responds to recent (misguided) criticisms of natural law thinking.

Understanding Natural Law: 

A Response to Hart and Potemra

by R.J. Snell

Sherif Girgis debated law professor Andy Koppelman 

at Harvard Law School a few weeks ago. 

C-SPAN was there to record the event 

and you can watch it here. 

A recent claim to reject the natural law risks misunderstanding the role of reason and overlooks the difference between practical reasoning and morality. The first in a two-part series.
In the most recent issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart, the noted theologian and author of the modern classic, The Beauty of the Infinite, brusquely rejects natural law theory, especially "the attempt in recent years by certain self-described Thomists, particularly in America, to import this tradition into public policy debates, but in a way amenable to modern political culture."
While having no "metaphysical disagreement" with them about the nature of the cosmos, Hart judges it a "hopeless cause" to hold "that compelling moral truths can be deduced from a scrupulous contemplation of the principles of cosmic and human nature, quite apart from special revelation, and within the context of the modern conceptual world."

Further, it just isn't likely, he claims, "that the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind," so that "any rightly attentive intellect" would know the wrongness of abortion, lying, same-sex marriage, and so on. For Hart, nature "tells us nothing of the sort," nor does "knowledge of our nature or of the nature of the universe at large instruct us clearly in the content of true morality."

........

Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

Books - What to Expect When No One's Expecting by Jonathan Last

Population Decline and the Birth Dearth

by Scott Yenor

Jonathan Last's new book attributes population decline
 and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era--first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. 
Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature.

All Western countries have birthrates below the replacement rates, suggesting that soon all countries will experience a graying of, and a decline in, population. Jonathan Last asks why this has happened in his new book, the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One's Expecting, putting demographic decline in a broader context.

Before we get to Last's argument, we should revisit a debate between two great Enlightenment philosophers: Montesquieu and David Hume. In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argues that ancient republics had more people than modern ones. Catastrophes aside, this lack of fecundity shows that a country is plagued with "internal vice and bad government." The internal vices can range from a proud celibacy to a self-indulgent libertinism.

Montesquieu argued that population trajectory is partly the product of marriage laws. Ancient republics encouraged men and women to marry, and penalized bachelorhood. "Old Roman laws sought to induce the citizens to marry," and censors were established to mind marriage mores. Roman law penalized parents without children and rewarded those with children with special honors and exemptions.

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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com

Three Catholic apologists tell their stories of grace and conversion.

Three Very Different Roads that Led to Rome

Jim Graves

A little more than 90 years ago, G.K. Chesterton, one of the 20th century’s most famous converts, entered the Catholic Church. Explaining “why I am a Catholic,” he wrote: “there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.”

A prolific writer, Chesterton used his considerable talents to author numerous works which won, and continue to win, many converts. The following are stories of three converts—the first of whom specifically credits Chesterton with being an influence on his conversion—who, since entering the Church, have devoted their lives to sharing the message that “Catholicism is true” with others.

David Fagerberg: Chesterton will teach you how to think

David Fagerberg has taught liturgical studies at the University of Notre Dame for the past decade. Born and reared in a Lutheran family in Minnesota, Fagerberg went to seminary and was ordained a minister for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Fagerberg’s reading of Chesterton led to his conversion to Catholicism in 1991.
.....
Matthew Arnold: New Age agnostic to Catholic apologist
Matthew Arnold is a convert, and one of the nation’s most talented Catholic apologists. Through his apostolate Pro Multis Media he promotes the teaching of the Faith through public speaking and communications media. Yet he was once an agnostic who dabbled in the New Age movement. 

Arnold, age 52, grew up in a nominally Christian family in Southern California. But, he joked, “About the most Bible reading I heard was by Linus on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special..................
Jesse Romero: I realized I was made for Heaven

A dozen years ago, an injury forced Jesse Romero to retire early from his job as a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy. He decided to begin a career as a full-time lay Catholic evangelist. Like Matthew Arnold, Romero speaks publicly and through a variety of communications media to promote the timeless teachings of the Church.

Romero is bilingual, and can communicate with ease to both English and Spanish-speaking audiences. He also preaches the Faith with vigor; “I don’t merely teach the Bible, I preach the Bible,” he says. “And, I do it with a passionate power.”

Although the Faith permeates his life today, Romero was once a self-described “secular humanist” who had little interest in religion.
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Read more: www.catholicworldreport.com