Hilaire Belloc - 130 Pages - EBOOK - PDF
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc, 1870-1853, was born in France of a French Catholic father and an English protestant mother. His mother later converted under the influence of Cardinal Manning, a good friend and mentor of Hilaire. His only sister, Marie Lowndes, was a fairly well-known writer like her brother Hilaire. Belloc’s father died young, leaving his widow in dire financial straits with two young children to support. They moved to England, and they settled in Slindon, West Sussex, where Belloc lived for most of his life. In 1906, he married Elodi Hogan, from Napa California. Their brief. but ecstatically happy. marriage ended with her death in 1914, after she had borne him five children. He never remarried, and he wore mourning for the rest of his life. This beautiful and precisely chiseled, almost fairy-taleish narrative, subtitled A Tale of Affection in Youth and Age, must certainly have been a poignant reminder that he himself had, by the inscrutable providence of God, been granted that deep measure of affection in his youth that is so idealistically pictured in Belinda, but denied that affection in old age that is equally well-depicted. This brief novel of human love and affection idealized is a delightful and cheerful reminder that indeed, life can have its moments of beauty, if even only as a foretaste of the delights promised to those blessed with the grace of perseverance unto salvation.
Hilaire Belloc - EBOOK - PDF
“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be”…This well known phrase could have easily been utilized in the introduction to this exceptional history of the religions of mankind that have come to birth in that portion of the world that has been the home of men since the beginning of the world and which to this day is the center of the stage where the story of our race is being played out. The epic battles among men for control of Syria and Palestine continue, and the Church still offers, as one of the primary prayer intentions of the Popes, the invitation to her faithful to Pray for the Recovery of the Holy Land.
In the 20th century as today, the land that once harbored the incarnate God and his holy family and disciples has now been criminally invaded by those men who, once upon a time, cried out on the very spot that they now have conquered, (with the connivance and invaluable and relentless assistance of the governments of the formerly Christian West), “Crucify Him!” and “We will not have this Man to reign over us!”This land of Syria and Palestine that had been under the power of that degenerate and infidel cult known as Mohammedanism for over 1000 years has been cruelly and brutally wrested from its inhabitants by the Mammonites of the West allied with the racist Jewish sect known as Zionism, which is considered by traditional Jews to be a heresy from Judaism. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is fast slipping into that original darkness of men known as paganism or demon worship.
Br. Charles Madden, OFM Conv. - 88 pages - EBOOK - PDF, Kindle, & EPUB
Just like the Four Green Fields of the famous Ballad, the articles comprising this book are arrayed like glittering gems in four sections entitled’ Our Lady, The Saints, Church History and Christian Living. These essays appeared over a period of thirty years in Immaculata Magazine, the publication issued from Marytown, the American headquarters of the Conventual Franciscans, St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Knights of the Immaculata. The Message of the title is the same message that the Church of Jesus Christ has been uttering for over 2000 years, the message of the Gospel of Salvation, but with a special urgency and a special messenger—Our Lady Queen of Angels—who has visited her world many times, and in many guises, over the last two hundred years in order to bring her children a special Message, so well described by Bro. Charles Madden, her son. Such titles as, To Sanctify, Teach, and Rule, As Moslems See Mary, The Chair of St. Peter, Angels in our Lives, Catholics in Freemasonry, The Fire of St. Patrick, Home-schooling: A Positive Good, A Commentary on Legalized Usury, and Our Lady of the New Millenium, promise something for all Catholic readers.
25 Essays by Robert D. Hickson - HC - 640 pages
Archbishop Vigano's Preface
Memory is a fundamental element of a people’s identity, civilization andculture: a society without memory, whose patrimony consists solely of apresent without a past, is condemned to have no future. It is alarming thatthis loss of collective memory affects not only Christian nations, but alsoseriously afflicts the Catholic Church herself and, consequently, Catholics.This amnesia affects all social classes and is not the result of chance, but ofsystematic work on the part of those who, as enemies of the True, Goodand Beautiful, must erase any ray of these divine attributes from even themost marginal aspects of social life, from our idioms, from memories ofour childhood and from the stories of our grandparents. The Orwellianaction of artificially remodeling the past has become commonplace in thecontemporary world, to the point that a class of high school studentsare unable to recognize an altarpiece depicting a scene from the life ofChrist or a bas-relief with one of the most revered saints of the past. Dr.Robert Hickson calls this inability “deficiency of dogmatic understanding”,“Catholic illiteracy of pestilential proportions”.Tabula rasa: millions of souls who only twenty or thirty years ago wouldhave immediately identified the Baptism of the Lord in the Jordan orSaint Jerome or Saint Mary Magdalene are capable of seeing only two menalong a river, an old man with a lion and a woman with a vase. Readingthe pages of Dante, Manzoni or one of the great Christian writers of thepast, many Catholics can no longer grasp the moral and transcendentsense of a culture that is no longer their common heritage, a jealouslyguarded legacy, the deep root of a robust plant full of fruit.In its place we have a bundle of the confused rubbish of the myths of theRevolution, the dusty Masonic ideological repertoire, and the iconographyof a supposed freedom won by the guillotine, along with the persecutionof the Church, the martyrdom of Catholics in Mexico and Spain, theend of the tyranny of Kings and Popes and the triumph of bankers andviii Gratitude, Contemplation, and the Worth of Catholic Literatureusurers. A lineage of kings, saints, and heroes is ignored by its heirs, whostoop to boasting about their ancestors who were criminals, usurpers,and seditious traitors: never has falsification reached the point of suchincomprehensible perversion, and it is evident that the desire to artificiallycreate such ancestry is the necessary premise for the barbarization of theoffspring, which is now practically accomplished.We must also recognize that this removal has found significantencouragement also among those who, within the Catholic Church,have erased two thousand years of the inestimable patrimony of faith,spirituality and art, beginning with a wretched sense of inferiority instilledin the faithful even by the Hierarchy since Vatican II. The ancient apostolicliturgy, on which centuries of poetic compositions, mosaics, frescoes,paintings, sculptures, chiseled vases, illuminated chorales, embroideredvestments, plainchants and polyphony have been shaped, has beenproscribed. In its place we now have a squalid rite without roots, bornfrom the pen of conspirators dipped in the inkwell of Protestantism; musicthat is no longer sacred but profane; tasteless liturgical vestments andsacred vessels made of common material. And as a grey counterpoint tothe hymns of St. Ambrose and St. Thomas, we now have poor paraphraseswithout metrics and without soul, grotesque paintings and disturbingsculptures. The removal of the admirable writings of the Fathers of theChurch, the works of the mystics, the erudite dissertations of theologiansand philosophers and, in the final analysis, of Sacred Scripture itself –whose divine inspiration is sometimes denied, sacrilegiously affirmingthat it is merely of human origin – have all constituted necessary stepsof being able to boast of the credit of worldly novelties, which beforethose monuments of human ingenuity enlightened by Grace appear asmiserable forgeries.This absence of beauty is the necessary counterpart to an absence ofholiness, for where the Lord of all things is forgotten and banished, noteven the appearance of Beauty survives. It is not only Beauty that hasbeen banished: Catholic Truth has been banished along with it, in all itscrystalline splendor, in all its dazzling consistency, in all its irrepressiblecapacity to permeate every sphere of civilized living. Because the Truthis eternal, immutable and divisive: it existed yesterday, it exists todayand it will exist tomorrow, as eternal and immutable and divisive as theWord of God.Certainly, behind this induced amnesia, there is a Trinitarian heresy. Andwhere the Deceiver lurks, the eternal Truth of God must be obscured inorder to make room for the lie, the betrayal of reality, the denial of the past.In a forgery that is truly criminal forgery, even the very custodians of thedepositum fidei ask forgiveness from the world for sins never committed byour fathers – in the name of God, Religion or the Fatherland – supportingthe widest and most articulated historical forgery carried out by theenemies of God. And this betrays not only the ignorance of History whichis already culpable, but also culpable bad faith and the malicious will todeceive the simple ones.Rediscovering memory, even in literature, is a meritorious and necessarywork for the restoration of Christianity, a restoration that is neededtoday more than ever if we want to entrust to our children a legacy to bepreserved and handed down as a tangible sign of God’s intervention inthe history of the human race: how much Providence has accomplishedover the centuries – and that art has immortalized by depicting miracles,the victories of the Christians over the Turk, sovereigns kneeling at thefeet of the Virgin, patron saints of famous universities and prosperouscorporations – can be renewed today and especially tomorrow, only if wecan rediscover our past and understand it in the light of the mystery ofthe Redemption.This book proposes the noble purpose of restoring Catholic memory,bringing it back to its ancient splendor, that is, the substance of aharmonious and organic past that has grown and still lives today, just asthe hereditary traits of a child are found developed in the adult man, oras the vital principle of the seed is found in the sap of the tree and in thepulp of the fruit. Robert Hickson rightly shows us, in the restoration ofmemory, the way to rediscover the shared faith that shapes the traits of ashared Catholic culture.In this sense it is significant – I would say extremely appropriate, even ifonly by analogy – to have also included Christian literature among theSacramentals, applying to it the same action as that of blessed water, theglow of the candles, the ringing of bells, the liturgical chant: the invocationof the Virgin in the thirty-third canto of Dante’s Paradiso, the dialogueof Cardinal Borromeo with the Innominato, and a passage by Chestertonall make Catholic truths present in our minds and, in some way, theyrealize what they mean and can influence the spiritual life, expandingand completing it. Because of this mystery of God’s unfathomable mercywe are touched in our souls, moved to tears, inspired by Good, spurredto conversion. But this is also what happens when we contemplate analtarpiece or listen to a composition of sacred music, in which a ray ofdivine perfection bursts into the greyness of everyday life and shows us thesplendor of the Kingdom that awaits us.The author writes: “We are called to the commitment to recover the life andfull memory of the Body of Christ, even if in our eyes we cannot do much torebuild that Body”. But the Lord does not ask us to perform miracles: Heinvites us to make them possible, to create the conditions in our souls andin our social bodies so that the wonders of divine omnipotence may bemanifested. To open ourselves to the past, to the memory of God’s greatactions in history, is an essential condition for making it possible for us tobecome aware of our identity and our destiny today so that we may restorethe Kingdom of Christ tomorrow.+ Carlo Maria ViganòTitular Archbishop of UlpianaApostolic Nuncio28 August 2020Saint AugustineBishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church
Paperpack -380 pages
Matthew Abraham Ryan (he changed his name to Abram because the name Abraham became distasteful to him when Lincoln declared war on his nation, the CSA), was born in Norfolk Virginia of an Irish Catholic family from County Limerick and is known not only as a mystic poet of the Catholic religion but also as the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy. He was the most popular and most quoted and recited poet of his generation in the South and in the North. This is an exact reprinting of the 12th edition of his complete collected works that was issued at Baltimore in 1888.
Father Ryan worked as a chaplain to the troops of his nation during the long and brutal war that killed all of the hopes for freedom and nationhood among his people who rose so manfully to battle to defend their homeland in 1861. In the hour of defeat Fr. Ryan won the heart of the entire South by his poem Conquered Banner, whose exquisite measure was taken, as he told a friend, from one of the Gregorian hymns.
Beyond and above and permeating his deep and abiding love for the South was his love for our Lord and our Blessed Lady that is so powerfully expressed in his poetry and verse. His was the heart of a lover and a mystic, one who knows life and reality so well that anyone could say that he truly understood what Saint Augustine meant when he said that our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee O Lord! Take up this precious work of his and prepare to be truly moved in your heart and soul with the beauty and depth of these emanations of his beautiful Catholic soul.
From Fr. Ryan’s Sursum Corda:
Lonely hearts! lonely hearts! this is but a land of grief;
Ye are pining for repose—ye are longing for relief:
What the world hath never given, kneel and ask of God above,
And your grief shall turn to gladness, if you lean upon His love.
Lonely hearts! God is Love.
Publishers’ Preface to the Second Edition.
For years the name of Father Ryan has been a household word. It is known wherever the English language is spoken, and everywhere it is reverenced as the appellation of a true child of song. It is especially dear to the people of the South, among whom he who bears it has lived and worked and touched his tuneful harp. These, his poems, have moved multitudes. They have thrilled the soldier on the eve of battle, and quickened the martial impulses of a chivalric race; they have soothed the soul-wounds of the suffering; and they have raised the hearts of men in adoration and benediction to the great Father of all.
When the announcement was first made that they were to be gathered together into a volume, the news was heard as glad tidings by the friends of the poet-priest, and the book had hardly appeared when the edition was exhausted. The ablest critics were generous in their praise of it, and predicted that it would be for its author a monument more enduring than brass.
Publishers’ Preface to the Twelfth Edition.
The publication of the poems of Father Ryan has reached the twelfth edition. To the Memoir, which found place in the eleventh edition, are now added many beautiful songs, some of which have not heretofore been published; and also many new illustrations.So popular have the writings of the poet-priest become, that many songs and ballads have been printed as emanations of his pen for which he was not responsible.
This edition is printed from new electrotype plates, and is greatly improved in style over all former editions. It includes all the poems written by Father Ryan which, if living, he would offer to the public. His death in 1880 stilled the sweetest voice that ever was raised in behalf of the faith and clime he loved so well.
Hilaire Belloc - PB 130 Pages
Hilaire Belloc - PB 302 Pages
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc, 1870-1953, was born in France of a French Catholic father and an English protestant mother. His mother later converted under the influence of Cardinal Manning, a good friend and mentor of Hilaire. Belloc is easily one of the most well-known Catholic writers and apologists of the 20th century. This book, published in 1923 after Belloc spent some time in the United States (his wife was American), is a bit reminiscent of Alexis deTocqueville’s work Democracy in America, published in 1835 after his own extensive travels in America. What is surprisingly different in their conclusions about the American political spirit is that Belloc saw more of a monarchical principle at work here than deToqueville did. The Contrast represents Belloc’s mature considerations of the important and critical contrast between England (and by extension, the rest of Western Europe which Belloc considers to be much closer in spirit and temper to England than to America) and that new, and to him foreign, thing that he encountered in his time here. The different topical areas that he discusses and contrasts are the physical (geographical), social, military, religious, literary, and linguistic. This is a fascinating analysis from the pen of a great Catholic man who was also a deeply provocative political thinker.
6 x 9 Hardcover 560 Pages
The late 20th and early 21st centuries have been an era of great trial for faithful Catholics. Decay, collapse, self-inflicted auto-demolition and liturgical suicide (to use the words of two 20th century popes), seeming defeat, and (dare we say it) nascent resurrection have characterised our years. This collection of articles is as good a sampling of thought from some of the best Catholic minds and warriors of this period of the Church's history, as may be found anywhere. It will stand for many years as a testament to what we have witnessed, how we have witnessed, and why we have witnessed in our days of exile.