How to Increase Priestly Vocations

I heard the other day driving along and listening to Catholic Radio that in some diocese or other, the Catholic Church had one priest for every 12,000 laymen.

The mind boggles, right?

I can’t cite to a source, because I can’t even remember what program I was listening to at the time.

Obviously, there are not enough priests. And this itself must be an important factor of the dearth of priestly vocations. Imagine you were thinking about taking a job serving 12,000 people regularly even as, say, a cashier. It’s a non-starter.

The Church needs more priests. Fortunately, the recipe is not hard to discern – although it is a fair bit of work to implement. But then, once the men of the parish were engaged in the overall project, it could get to be lots of fun for everyone.

The King is a Traditionalist

And he has apparently been reading deeply in the traditionalist canon for many years. The address below was recorded in 2016.

His advocacy of traditional architecture is of course quite well known. And, of course, impudently scorned by the apostles of architectural modernism.

It will be interesting to see how hard the glitterati work to ridicule him. Now that he’s King, it is likely to start in earnest. They’ve been after him for decades already, of course, as a dolt, and a poltroon, a weakling and a fool. My earliest impression, from my boyhood, was their avowed conviction that Charles is a dunce. But that sort of ad hominem attack is of course in complete concord with their determination to destroy every institution of the West whatsoever. It is formally analogous to their toppling of the statues of our cultural heroes. In his very body, Charles is an exponent of the Traditional Order: that suffices to his immolation on the altar of the Modern.

It has nothing necessarily to do with Charles himself.

This is evident from his address which I here post. Charles is in it revealed as a thoughtful, careful man, who grapples with history from the deepest, widest, highest perspective.

It is the sort of perspective we should all want from a king. It is the sort of perspective to which kings are purposed, and called; it is the perspective proper to their offices.

All the SWPL is White Supremacist, & So Must Be Stamped Out

We learn from Vice Magazine that interest in and enjoyment of the wilderness is characteristic of white supremacists. We had already learned that grammar, diction, logic, and math are white supremacist. Also science, ergo, and so then knowledge, and a fortiori wisdom; thus any notion of characterological merit, or excellence.

When truth as such is dethroned, nothing can survive. Thanks, you goddamned nominalists!

NB: that is not a curse, but a statement of fact.

A pattern emerges: everything that white people generally and particularly and so noticeably like, respect or enjoy is white supremacist, and must be wiped out.

Beauty is Salutary, Ugliness Noxious

My wife and I are enjoying a short vacation with my in-laws in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It is a lovely place, rendered sublime along the western edge of the valley by the unearthly majesty of the Grand Tetons. The Tetons seem to the eye of this experienced outdoorsman one of those sublime landscapes in which natural beauty is so intense as to verge on numinous sanctity (other such places I have sojourned: Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, the Snæfellsjökull Peninsula in Iceland). Such places command awe, and foster an inward hush.

On Worship

Having followed the link in my latest Philosophical Skeleton Key on prayer to a prior post in which I set forth some of the metaphysical prolegomenae thereto, commenter Hambone there wrote the other day:

Kristor, you said:

Having no way to comprehend spiritual realities, I could not even understand quite exactly what the articles of the Credo properly mean, or what I was meant to be doing in worship.

I’m somewhere in the middle of understanding this post and applying it – I have long struggled with making my faith *real* rather than mental affirmation coupled with ritual observance. What ARE you meant to be doing in worship? And how does that flow from the fundamental spiritual nature of life?

Commenter Rhetocrates then suggested that my response should be promoted to a post of its own:

That’s the $64 question, isn’t it? I’m still working on it. One never finishes working on it. One cannot. Worship is fathomless. How not? Its object is infinite. We cannot begin to have a complete answer to your question.

But, I can say a few things about it.

The Boomer Epidemic

The covid pandemic is mostly a Boomer thing. The Chinese Flu kills a tiny percentage of people younger than the Boomers. Like every other medical difficulty, it kills rather more of their parents than it does of Boomers. Only the Boomers and their parents then are much at risk from the disease. Their parents are no longer much able to sway either public discourse or public policy. The Boomers are in charge. So the panic about covid, and the policies implemented in respect thereto, are mostly the result of Boomers worried about themselves. They have shown themselves – in the person of such governors as Cuomo – totally willing to throw the generation of their parents under the bus. Because, hey, those guys were going to die soon anyway. They have also shown themselves utterly indifferent to the manifold catastrophe their disastrous policy responses to the disease have inflicted upon all younger generations.

As with every other thing they have touched, the Boomers have ruined public health by ruining civil society.

Clark Ashton Smith’s “City of the Singing Flame” & Synchronicity

Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961): Plants (Decade of the 1940s)

Orthosphereans have discussed the topic of synchronicity on several occasions. Synchronicity, a coinage of the psychologist Carl Jung, refers to the phenomenon of “lucky coincidences” or meaningfully convergent events.  There are several orders of synchronicity.  The one that I want to discuss in the following paragraphs is of a low order, but it serves to illustrate my conviction that we live, not merely in a physical world, but in a web of meaning whose source can only be immaterial – that is to say, spiritual.  Events of a low order can arrange themselves, after all, in meaningful patterns.  Patterning attracts the mind because patterning, at least in part, informs the mind, just as it informs the universe.  Recently I posted at The Orthosphere my essay on “Eco-Music from Mahler to Rasmussen,” in two parts.  “Eco-Music” means music permeated by the composer’s sense of the cosmos as a finely woven, complex pattern of spirit and body, temporality and spatiality, causality and spontaneity.  I attempted to relate the compositional process of such artists to the visionary quest of the vates, seer, or shaman, who intercedes for the tribe in the realm of the sacred and on the home ground of the gods.  When contemporary composers like John Luther Adams or Sunleif Rasmussen, express themselves in written word, they not only reveal their knowledge of the vatic tradition; they also reveal themselves as trying to communicate lore acquired on a level higher than the everyday, rather in the manner of an initiate in the mysteries.  Listening to their music – which I did, intensely, over the period of accumulating the essay – convinced me of the validity of such statements.

Sir Roger Scruton has Passed

Sir Roger Scruton (1944 -2020)

The Good Thing About Bad Architecture

The fire at Notre Dame has had me noticing architecture lately. Most of what I see, I abhor. This has for decades been true almost everywhere I have gone, both in North America and in Europe. Is it not the same, for you?

The greater the concentration of buildings erected since WWII, the worse the abhorrence.

The Argument From the Enmity of Our Enemies

My heart is of course broken at the disaster inflicted yesterday upon Notre Dame de Paris. All that must be said about the cultural and religious meaning of this catastrophe has already been well said by many commentators of the Right, so I shall not here repeat them. Everyone knows that this was an attack of the Enemy upon the Body of Christ, and upon Christendom, such as she still is. The chorus of the Right has now, rightly, begun to ask why this obvious fact may not be mentioned. And everyone knows the answer to that question, too: Islam, modernism and Liberalism are all bound and determined to destroy Christianity, and Christendom.

One thing only, of the obvious, necessary things that must be said, have I not yet seen anywhere said: Saint Denis, Our Lady, and all the saints, pray for France, for the West, and for her Church.

There is a yet deeper question: why is it, exactly, that Liberalism, modernism, Islam, et alia, are so determined to destroy Christianity?