Advent carols #1

We wait in joyful hope.

Will that be comprehensive, Your Eminence?

I like to give people their proper titles when I address them. I call patients Sir or Madam and wouldn't dream of calling them by their first name unless invited to. I like the fact that Saga Car Insurance are aiming at the senior end of the clerical market, but still insist on the niceties. They're missing a trick, however, in that they don't appear to have the title Monsignor.

Yeah, but, no but....

Divorce is not a funny subject. Madonna[sic] is an odd fish whose pomposity and posturing, like that of most megastars deserves skewering on a regular basis. Here's a joke that has been doing the rounds for wee while now:

When Madonna first moved to England she said she wanted to feel more English.

She is now an unmarried, single mother with three kids from different fathers, one of them black.

Job done!

Frankie Boyle - foul-mouthed hypocrite (oh, and by the way, you're paying him)

I assume Frankie Boyle gets paid handsomely by the BBC for his spots on Mock The Week. If you pay the licence fee (and yes, I know I don't need to watch telly) you pay him. Therefore I pay him, just as I pay Jonathan Ross. The thing is I believe the BBC (Civilisation, The Ascent of Man, The Proms, QI, Choral Evensong, The Shipping Forecast, Little Dorritt, Dad's Army) is, in general A Good Thing. But I'm having my doubts, as you might be aware. Charles Moore is relentless in chasing the issue of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross and their foul-mouthed, disgusting and possibly criminal harassment of Andrew Sachs. He also points out the fact that Frankie Boyle got away with making jokes about the Queen's vagina (yes, you did read that correctly. He made the joke on public-broadcast, primetime BBC One. Senior editors will have approved it.)

Boyle, however, so edgy , daring and brimming with cheeky nonchalance [those are euphemisms for distasteful, foul-mouthed and spiteful] on many things, has his limits. He's happy to make jokes about the disabled, paedophilia, rape and terrorism according to the article in The Telegraph. But he does draw the line:

...Boyle himself is censorious of certain fellow comedians. "There's still a lot of racism in stand-up," he says, "but they [the comics] don't seem to recognise it. They just think they're doing a 'funny' Spanish accent or a 'funny' Chinese face. I find it offensive that these people haven't grown up or educated themselves. I have pointed it out to them at times."

Oh, come, come, Frankie why so coy? A man happy to make jokes about the rape of children gets all uppity about race. I hate racism, but this shibboleth is supposed to put Boyle among the ranks of the righteous? "I find it offensive"

Do me a favour.

Shooting sacred cows

How on earth did Harry and Paul get this past the commissars at the BBC? Castro over a cliff? Mandela nicking iPhones? They must have been very, very drunk....

Violated

On Friday night at about 10.40 pm Mrs P and I were relaxing, watching TV and contemplating a cup of tea before retiring. Paulinus Minor Major had come downstairs earlier saying he couldn't sleep and could he go to sleep in our bed? Of course he could. Out of the corner of my eye I saw some movement coming down the stairs. He couldn't still be awake, surely? I followed into the kitchen only to see a fully grown man, IC-1 (if you watch The Bill) brown blouson jacket, blue jeans, 5'6"-5'8", brown hair swept back from his forehead exiting the back door (which had been left unlocked earlier).

I gave chase and he went over the wall in to next door's garden. I went round to apprehend him with a piece of 4x2 (with a rusty nail in the end for good measure) that was in the garden. He gave me the slip. I aggravated a recent meniscal tear and have hobbled all weekend. After checking the slumbering boys, Strathclyde's finest arrived (an impressive 5 minutes after getting the call). They searched the gardens around our house and went around the streets. A van from the dog branch arrived and some beautifully fearsome looking police dogs under the charge of two pretty young policewomen took up the scent but I think the rat-faced chummy was long-gone.

A video camera has been nicked but nothing else. We all slept in the same room that night and keep all the doors locked now, day or night. Most importantly our boys were not touched but this man, this burglar, this felon, this thief, entered the sacred environs of our home. We were stupid to have left a door unlocked.

I'm trying to be a good Christian but I'm having some black thoughts about what I would have done had I apprehended him. Stupid as he may have carried a knife. Stupid again, as I might have succeeded in doing violence and would have faced the wrath of the CPS and more importantly the judgement of Almighty God. It is not that he stole (he did), but what he might have done to my children (he probably wouldn't have done anything) that irks.

Please pray for us that the anxiety and lust for vengeance dissipate.

Gay activism - the fascism de nos jour

First off, let me state for the record that I hold the Catholic Church's teaching about same-sex attraction:

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

There is most definitely something of the night about gay activists and it seems to be getting worse. Martin Kelly reports the disruption of an evangelical prayer service in the States. With knowing irony the perpetrators dressed themselves in pink scarves to look like the Only Gay Al-Qaeda Cell In The Village.



So gay activists are aping Islamofascists. I've long thought of fascism in connection with Peter Tachell: I admire Tatchell's stand against Iran and Mugabe, but he has a nasty habit of, well, fascist behaviour. How else would you describe the intimidation of churchgoers and clergy when he arrived mob-handed and disrupted Holy Mass on Palm Sunday 2004? He pulled the same stunt at the Synod of the Church of England (though I would note that he stops short of trying the same trick outside Finsbury Park Mosque on a Friday afternoon - I wonder why?). He's very much an advocate the SORs and I guess would see the consequent suppression of Catholic organisations as cracking eggs to make this particular omelette.



On a more personal level he always seems to be in black and until recently had a penchant for leather jackets. Then there is the love of street violence and shouting others down. I've commented elsewhere on his creepy views about indoctrinating children in his, ahem, rather queer version of human sexuality. It all adds up to something a bit nasty. Add to this the fact that he's a Green Party parliamentary candidate - I've logged my own thoughts before about extreme ecomaniacs, eugenics and fascism.



What's even more sinister is the deletion of an article on wiki about 'Gay Fascism'. it would seem that some ideas are becoming unthinkable or unsayable. Thankfully there is a useful site called deletionpedia that archives such pages.

Finally this via Mark Shea: a group of evangelical Christians is physically assaulted by the Sturmabteilung of the San Francisco gay community:

I went to the Castro (the homosexual district of San Francisco) like we usually do on Friday nights. Normally, we sit on 18th and Castro, and someone plays the guitar, and we all worship God. Sometimes a person will yell at us, or maybe a few. Sometimes people will ignore us. Sometimes people will let us pray with them.
This time was not a normal night. It was the first time we'd been back in the Castro to do our normal outreach since California Proposition 8, which defined marriage as "one man with one woman" was passed. We played the guitar and sang together and worshiped the Lord. After just singing and worshiping God for a while, Roger decided that we should all hold hands in a circle and continue singing. So we did.
Someone (Actually a person who came up and hugged and kissed some of us who he knew from the past) convinced some people that we were there to protest against the no on 8 campaign.
Then some guy who was dressed up like one of the sisters (The sisters of perpetual indulgence is a group of men who dress up like nuns and call themselves the spiritual authority of the Castro.) took a curtain-type thing (Which I think they use to curse people) and wrapped it around us.
Then a crowd started gathering. We began to sing "Amazing Grace", and basically sang that song the whole night. (At some points we also sang "Nothing but the Blood of Jesus" and "Oh the Blood of Jesus".) At first, they just shouted at us, using crude, rude, and foul language and calling us names like "haters" and "bigots". Since it was a long night, I can't even begin to remember all of the things that were shouted and/or chanted at us. Then, they started throwing hot coffee, soda and alcohol on us and spitting (and maybe even peeing) on us. Then, a group of guys surrounded us with whistles, and blasted them inches away from our ears continually. Then, they started getting violent and started shoving us. At one point a man tried to steal one of our Bibles. Chrisdene noticed, so she walked up to him and said "Hey, that's not yours, can you please give it back?". He responded by hitting her on the head with the Bible, shoving her to the ground, and kicking her. I called the cops, and when they got there, they pulled her out of the circle and asked her if she wanted to press charges. She said "No, tell him I forgive him." Afterwards, she didn't rejoin us in the circle, but she made friends with one of the people in the crowd, and really connected heart to heart. Roger got death threats. As the leader of our group, people looked him in the eyes and said "I am going to kill you.", and they were serious. A cop heard one of them, and confronted him. (This part is kinda graphic, so you should skip the paragraph if you don't want to be offended.) It wasn't long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants - basically trying to molest me. I used one hand to hold my pants up, while I used the other arm to hold one of the girls. The guys huddled around all the girls, and protected them. Soon after, the cops came and stood between us and the mob. When it was getting more heated, the cops were like "You guys should leave." and Roger said "We want to stay." Someone tried to steal my backpack, but I tapped a cop on the shoulder, and said "Hey, that's my bag." and he got it from him and gave it to me. Others weren't so lucky. Probably half our team got their jackets stolen. Eventually, as the crowd was getting more and more uncontrollable, the cops were afraid for our lives, so they escorted us to our van. (The cops were very nice to us from start to finish.) Our van was parked pretty far because it was hard to find parking that day. As the cops escorted us, the mob followed us, until the cops formed a line, and held off the people so we could drive away. We took the long way home, just in case anyone tried to follow us. When we got home, we prayed and sang more, and then prayed over each-other. Please know my heart. All of what we do is for the Love of Jesus Christ, and the love for those in the Castro. The Bible says to love God, and then love people. We can only love because He loved us first. We can't hate the people because they are just broken and blinded by the spirit of this age. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities and Powers. It's not a political thing, we just love the people. This is the raw footage of the walk from 18th and Castro Street to our car. It was only the very tail end of the night and says that we were all about prop8... when in reality we had nothing to do with prop 8 this night.

Suffer the little children, Frank?

Professor Frank Furedi writes in today's Telegraph (We keep children safe to let them run wild)

This growing disconnection between the generations fuels the confused response that adults have towards children.

His touching concern for children might have more power were it not for the fact that he is married to Ann Furedi, the head of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, the UK's largest private provider of abortions.

Is there any greater 'disconnection between the generations' than killing children at a rate of 190,000/year?

Stocking up for lunch at Ecclestone Square

Your collection money in action. Yah?

Surreal

It would appear that some gay activists are blaming the black population of California for passing of Propositon 8 (the addition to the constitution of the State of California to declare: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.")

Mark Steyn reports this bizarre encounter:

Unfortunately the "blame the blacks" meme is being commonly accepted by some so-called "progressive" gay activists. A number of Rod 2.0 and Jasmyne Cannick readers report being subjected to taunts, threats and racist abuse... Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.

It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU N*GGER, one man shouted at me. If your people want to call me a F*GGOT, I will call you a n*gger... A young WeHo clone said after last night the n*ggers better not come to West Hollywood if they knew what was BEST for them.

Scratch the surface....

A Diamond in the Ordure

I work in a hospital in the most deprived area of Europe (4 out of the six poorest electoral wards in Europe are in my catchment area and they had to come up with a new deprivation category to cover the degree of poverty there - DepCat 7). My colleague, a good Christian woman of Baptist proclivities talks of the spiritual poverty with more alarm than the physical squalor. I think she is right. There is money for bread, shelter and warmth. There is often money too for ciggies, Sky+ and Special Brew. But what really stunts is the lack of any aspiration for any other kind of life. Years of welfare dependency have bred this, from a people who were poor before, but who fed and sheltered their families from the fruit of industries, long since gone elsewhere.

In the midst of the ritual handwringing over the avoidable death of Baby P (May his poor tortured soul now be at peace with Our Lord and all the saints) a gem of an observation by one at the coalface. This doctor comes from the Indian subcontinent and rather than making lame jokes about the constitutional makeup of the country actually, you know, goes and treats poor people in their own homes. She has some uncomfortable truths to pass on:

Dear Ms Featherstone

I think the people who should truly say sorry for such events are the opinion leaders of the Guardian. Please allow me to explain.

Last week I visited (as a doctor) a family in a council estate. The mother was concerned about her 12 year old son. She was very pleased that her older son was now on incapacity and would therefore do well for himself in terms of money. There is nothing wrong with this older boy that makes him incapacitated, but that is another story. She also had a 14 year old daughter, who while I was there, constantly argued with her mother demanding money for cigarettes. The three children had three different fathers, all absent. The kids, while I could see were still children, gleamed with malignant insolence. I can see them turning into damaged adults. I feel sorry for the trap they are in – the trap created directly by the welfare state whereby the family, and all those in the neighbourhood, see welfare as a lifestyle option. They live in squalor but have more wealth than most people I knew in India; they certainly have more material comforts than I ever had growing up in Delhi.

The Guardian describes such families as poor. The Labour party wants to throw money at the family. The Guardian readers blame Margaret Thatcher for this state of affairs, smug in their modern pieties, their intellectual laziness, and their stupidity masquerading as sanctimonious concern. I used to work with slum children in Delhi; they had very little, but even the most physically disabled amongst them made an effort.

There is no hope for Britian. Civilisations dont die, they commit suicide. And before they commit suicide, they read and believe the Guardian.

I truly and deeply feel sorry for all the children who are the victims of the welfare state. Things are much, much worse for the slum children in India, I saw more dignity among them and certainly greater hope.

I am not sure if you will understand this message. I am too tired to explain further. Either you will get or you wont. Either way, it will make no difference to anything.

A Question

Can the Eucharistic Prayer in the Ordinary Form of Mass be said in silence in the manner of the Extraordinary Form of Mass?

A Jokey Traitor

I attended a meeting at which a naturalised doctor - born and brought up in the Indian subcontinent but trained at undergraduate and postgraduate level in this country - began his talk (at a large and important medical conference run by a Scottish Royal College) by welcoming the delegates to : "The Republic of Scotland"

Ho.Ho.Ho.

I do not know whether this man is a subject of the Crown. I assume he is. If he isn't then the constitutional make up of this country, with all due respect, is none of his damned business. If he has become a subject of the Crown and a citizen of this country, I assume he has made the following oath (or a similar affirmation):

Oath of allegiance:
I (name) swear by Almighty God that on becoming a British citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law.

If the latter, his snide denegration of the Crown and our constitution show he is not a man of his word.

Glasgow's loss, Lothian's gain

Fr Paul Francis CP (shown on the right of this picture) with one of his brethren

Bad news. Fr Paul Francis of Laus Crucis is moving in December to Prestonpans. This is very sad for those of us who have come to love this lovely, gentle, scholarly priest (who I am sure winces and prays for me when he reads my graceless rants).

I want to thank him for all he has done for me: as a good priest, an honest preacher of God's Word and a gentle and wise confessor.

Pray for him that the Lord will be with him in all he does and especially in his new apostolate.

Our Lady of Sorrows - pray for him.
St Paul of the Cross - pray for him.
St Charles of Mount Argus - pray for him.

The Movie Poster on the Side of A Bus in Glasgow Yesterday

So now I have to explain to my seven- and nine-year-old sons what a 'porno' is. Great. Thanks, guys.

Martin Kelly has some thoughts on the subject.

Chesterton won't go away

Great piece by Allan Massie in last weeks's Spectator:


The everlasting man

Chesterton refuses to go away. You may think he should have done so. Orwell tried to show him the door:

Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life … every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan.

Given that Orwell asserted that everything he himself wrote was intended to advance the cause of Democratic Socialism, I’m not sure that he was entitled to complain that others were writing propaganda, but of course it was the nature of the propaganda and the tenor of Chesterton’s argument that he found offensive. Chesterton refused to believe in the idea of progress and held the theology of St Thomas Aquinas in higher regard than the science of Darwin or the philosophy of Marx or Nietzsche. It’s a mistake, he once wrote, to suppose that Shakespeare had not thought of the Superman. He had; he just didn’t think much of him. That this dismissal may do scant justice to Nietzsche’s concept is beside my immediate point.

It is Chesterton’s scepticism with regard to modernity that makes what might seem his most timely book — The Flying Inn — read very oddly. Most Spectator readers will doubtless recall its conceit, which is that England has become a Muslim state, one in which alcohol (though itself an Arabic word) is banned. Then, you may remember, a Sussex innkeeper, an Irish adventurer and a charming girl set out on an exuberant course with a mobile inn, a barrel of rum, a great cheese, a dog called Quoodle, and a tendency to burst into song. This is all very jolly, but the oddity of the book is that the aristocratic converts to Islam adopt the religion on account of the appeal of its simplifying modernity, whereas nowadays those who, like the former Spectator contributor, Mark Steyn, seek to make our flesh creep with doleful prophecies of the Islamification of the member-states of the European Union, regard Islam as backward, stuck in the Middle Ages, and in its extremist form, as a jealous repudiation of modernity. In short, Chesterton’s version of Islam does not at all accord with our experience of it. So The Flying Inn ought to be out-of-date. And yet Chesterton won’t go away.

He is still very much with us. A French literary magazine, L’Atelier du Roman, has just devoted the greater part of its latest issue to him, with articles on Anarchy in the Service of Orthodoxy (Vice Versa), Inquest on Father Brown, Two or Three Things Learned from Chesterton, The Orthodoxy of an Everlasting Man, Science Fiction and Chesterton, and It was Better Before, which last title might have made Orwell grind his teeth.

What is disconcerting for many about Chesterton is that, while deadly serious, he revelled in paradoxes, absurdity and farce. He believed in the Devil, believed in him as perhaps few in the last centuries did, but the weapon he employed against him was laughter; he was at one with Rabelais : ‘the discovery of the reality of evil and the battle against it are at the basis of all gaiety and even of all farce’. Chesterton would have found Orwell admirable — and ridiculous; ridiculous because of his solemnity. ‘The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums’, he declared.

He thought in paradoxes, on the sensible ground that if an idea is worth anything it ought to be able to be held upside down and shaken about. Sometimes, admittedly, the paradoxes flew too easily, too frequently and tiresomely from his pen. He wrote too much and often, I suspect, when he was tired and then the paradoxes had a mechanical or tinkling sound like music from an elderly barrel-organ.

But at his best they make you think, and this is always disturbing: ‘Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.’ That’s a thought you get your mind round. Because he was a man of faith he understood and valued doubt. He thought Charles II’s deathbed admission to the Roman Church proof of his perfect scepticism. The wafer might, or might not be, the body of Christ, but then it might, or might not be, a wafer.

More than 70 years after his death he remains an entertaining writer, and a disquieting one. In the opinion of the editor of L’Atelier du Roman, Lakis Proguidis, ‘no 20th-century author has so thoroughly examined the yawning gulf cut in each soul by the ideology of Progress’.

Remembrance Part 2

Remembrance, especially at the Cenotaph, commemorates the numberless men and women who served, suffered and died. I give you the story of one of my father's comrades in the Long Range Desert Group, Kenneth Smith, GC.

On the night of 10 January 1945, on the Island of Ist in the Adriatic (off the coast of Yugoslavia), Signalman Smith was a member of a patrol of the Long Range Desert Group, which was attacked by saboteurs, who laid time-bombs in the vital houses of the Island. After hearing some shots, Signalman Smith entered the Wireless Room and found one such bomb on the table. Realising that there were a number of partisans in the room and young children elsewhere in the house, Signalman Smith immediately picked up the bomb, which was ticking. He intended to move it to a place of safety behind a nearby wall, but he had only gone a few yards outside the house when the bomb exploded and he was blown to pieces. There is no doubt that Signalman Smith's action certainly saved the lives of many of his comrades, partisans and civilians, and that he showed superb courage and complete disregard for personal safety in lifting a time-bomb which was already ticking when he knew that it might explode at any minute.

My father and his comrades buried what was left of him.



May his soul and the souls of the faithful departed, rest in peace.

Remembrance Part 1

The Good Doctor Ches has a moving piece - the final letter of a brave man, wrongly executed for cowardice:

3 December 1914

Dearest beloved,

I write to you today in great distress, and if God and the Holy Virgin do not help me, it will be for the last time. I am so distressed and overwhelmed that I cannot find the words to say all I would like to say to you, and I see that when you read these lines you will suffer for my sake, you my friend who are so dear to me. Forgive me for everything you will suffer because of me. I would completely despair if I did not have my faith and religion to sustain me in this terrible moment.

The rest is HERE.

We who have lived in the aftermath of the suffering of others and under the protection of brave, sometimes rough men who stand ready in the night and would visit violence on those who would harm us, have a duty to honour those whose suffering we will never share and who protect us with their lives.

We've been here before

As I grow older I realise the truth of the words of the Preacher:

What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

So it is with the current apparent rise the atheists. I am currently reading Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and came across this:

The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of proselytism in the most fanatical degree; and from thence, by an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according to their means. What was not to be done toward their great end by any direct or immediate act might be wrought by a longer process through the medium of opinion. To command that opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it. They contrived to possess themselves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues to literary fame. Many of them indeed stood high in the ranks of literature and science. The world had done them justice and in favor of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar principles. This was true liberality, which they returned by endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true philosophy.

The Holy Catholc Church has withstood such in the past and will do so again. What we are experiencing at the moment will get worse. Some will no doubt lose their reputations, their livelihoods and some, perhaps, their lives. Pray we have the strength to endure whatever comes. Yet be assured that the Kingdom of God will withstand these attacks. Pray for those who would persecute us.

Classy

First, apologies for the pictures. Secondly this will make me sound a horrible snob, but blimey! What's going on here?

In the end, making Missy's wedding dreams come true cost her father - who lives in a caravan and surfaces driveways for a living - a whopping £100,000.
But as his princess, who hasn't been in a classroom since she was nine and wants to be a glamour model, posed for photographs, her father Simon, 35, declared it was worth every penny. 'I'm very proud of her today,' he said.
Missy was just happy to be the undisputed centre of attention.
Her dress, studded with Swarovski crystals, and with a 10ft wide train, was so heavy that it took ten guests to help her struggle out of the Rolls-Royce Phantom that brought her to the church.

That's right - a church

The couple married six days after Missy turned 16 at St Mary's Catholic Church in Congleton-Cheshire. After the ceremony-guests in feathers and crystals enjoyed champagne and an all-day buffet at the reception. Girls as young as nine showed off bikini tops, high heels and make-up.
Guest Victoria Docherty, 23, who wore a £700 hotpants and bra outfit, said: 'This isn't unusual - it's just what we do at weddings. It's all very extravagant. Everything is paid for by the bride's daddy.'

'a £700 hotpants and bra outfit'?In church? A Catholic Church?

Here is a question for the clergy, and it's a tricky one. What would you do in this situation? Bear in mind one of the families is from the, ahem, Not-Conventionally-Housed Community, who might be a bit upset, but would you stop the wedding?

Do ya like dags?

Taking the pledge

Forget any notion that your children are your own. After the sex education dictats and the creepy views of Peter Tatchell, on both sides of the Atlantic, children are being bullied into signing up to whatever the nomenklatura think is good for us all.


In the States, it's Gay Rights:

A California school system refuses to say what action, if any, it will take after it received complaints about a kindergarten teacher who encouraged her students to sign "pledge cards" in support of gays.

During a celebration of National Ally Week, Tara Miller, a teacher at the Faith Ringgold School of Arts and Science in Hayward, Calif., passed out cards produced by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network to her class of kindergartners.

The cards asked signers to be "an ally" and to pledge to "not use anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) language or slurs; intervene, when I feel I can, in situations where others are using anti-LGBT language or harassing other students and actively support safer schools efforts."

Now the Church is very clear that unjust discrimination against homosexuals is contrary to the teaching of the Church. But clearly since the Jesuits gave up the idea that 7-year-olds were ripe for the Faith the vacuum, it would seem, has been filled by militant gay rights activists.

Meanwhile, Laban Tall reports that a council in East Anglia would like primary school children to sign up to being nice to the Mobile-Home-Dwelling Community:

A group of children were asked to take a pledge to be "nice to" gipsies on a school visit to their local council offices.
Mr Wakeman said: "The two people taking the workshop asked the children if they wanted to stand up and make a pledge.

"None of the children stood up because I suspect they felt awkward, but the pledge was read out anyway.

"They were asked to make a series of promises to be kind to gipsy and traveller children, welcome them into the community and not bully them.

"The children were encouraged to put their fingers in the air or their hands on their hearts to signify their acceptance.

"I am very unhappy about any child of primary school age being asked to take any form of pledge to any group in society.

Now I'm all for children being nice to others and teach my children to welcome the stranger and that bullying is bad. These are general rules I have no problem being taught in the context of moral education. Who could counter that, no, they would like to keep the option of bullying and being unpleasant to Travellers? The fact is that this is a practice redolent of the worst days of Stalin. What's that comrade? You don't want to take a pledge approved of by The Great Leader? Dear, dear, comrade! You'd better watch your back.

Give it up parents - the State wants your kids.

Atheist Buses - C of E wades in

Why the Church expects the faithful to marry in a Church

Now do you see why following the norms is a good idea?

All Souls

O God, Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful,
grant to the souls of Thy departed servants
the remission of all their sins,
that through our pious supplications
they may obtain the pardon which they have always desired.
Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Amen.

Please, of your charity, pray for the souls of the fathers of two of my colleagues who have died in the last week.

What Heaven might sound like

The Laodiceans think they may have found the most beautiful piece of music in the world. Ever. I think they are wrong as they didn't include Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis.

If Mrs P can muster a 40-piece choir, I'd like it at my funeral. Please.

I hope your All Saints Day is full of joyful hope.

All Hallows

And he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street thereof, and on both sides of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve fruits, yielding its fruits every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no curse any more; but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall serve him. And they shall see his face: and his name shall be on their foreheads. And night shall be no more: and they shall not need the light of the lamp, nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall enlighten them, and they shall reign for ever and ever.

Revelation 22:1-5

All Holy Men and Women - Pray For Us!