Go here instead. It’s much nicer.    ~

Golly! That’s nine days away! Sorry about that, y’all. Had some things to think about. Some friends came to visit last week. We were going to go look at lots of important things, but it was just so much nicer to sit around in the garden and drink tea. And I didn’t have to put on my shoes, which is always a bonus. I’m retiring. If Diocletian can quit to grow cabbages so can I.

This is a photo of the main strip in Norcia’s centro storico, getting ready for the festa di San Benedetto tomorrow. It comes off the Twitter page of the Norcia commune. Apparently we’re supposed to be proud that the town is now beholden to the EU, that blatantly hates Christianity. The festa is a huge deal; the regional and local commune government representatives all come and there’s all these civic dignitaries standing around.

It’s a question of re-orientation. Our attention, while we think we are attending to the will of God, is wholly centred on the world. It is nagging me, this feeling that there is a strange and apparently disconnected series of things that somehow, when put all together, make a coherent hidden message. This isn’t blogging so much as “free associating”. Some of these items might not seem connected. I feel like that character trope in thriller movies who goes mad pasting apparently unrelated news clippings to a wall and trying to connect them all with red string.

“It is not to superficial souls or light minds taken up with worldly solicitudes that this book is addressed… To them, prayer and contemplation seem, at best, nothing but pious dreaming, useless things…” Latest for the Remnant “The Purgative Way and the call to holiness; How to Ignore Walter Kasper and Co. and Become a Saint.”  It’s all part of my ongoing effort to focus on the Faith instead of the Crisis alone.

“Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?” All his plots, all his machiavellian manipulations, his grasping at power and lust, his ruined vocation, a life spent on evil, and it was all for nothing. The thought of his condition now is terrifying. May God have mercy on him. And on us, on all his victims, on all the people who were harmed and scarred and whose souls he put in peril.

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: ADHUC HABEMUS PAPAM! Beatissimum Dominum, Dominum Benedictum, Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Papam, Qui nomen sibi retinuit Benedictum. …. Et gaudium adhuc maius, Alium habemus Papam! Misericordissimum ac humillimum Dominum, Dominum Georgium Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Cardinalem Bergoglio, Qui sibi nomen imposuit Franciscum. Laudetur Deus mirorum! ~ Remember that sinking feeling? That whisper in the back of your brain, “We’re toast.”? ~ It was too soon. Two days and only four ballots.

I in a state of domestic suspension, waiting for the lady from the agency to come over to take pictures of the house. This is not a desk at which any work can be done. She was supposed to be here on Thursday. I thought I had it ready then, but discovered that Mandelbrot had snuck in that night and installed an infinitely regressing metaphysical ladder of possible domestic perfection I will never reach the end of… I can feel the tendrils of OCD mania coiling gently and insidiously into my mind… I’m wandering the house, dust cloth in hand, looking for things an inch out of alignment.

How about this? Hey, remember when no one could admit publicly to reading Mundabor? Gute zeiten, eh? This is the guy who has given scandals so many times in recent years one easily forgets half of them. He is happy to march together with inverted activist on St Patrick’s parade, has not problem in taking part to a scandalous Met Gala that mocks the church, and has refused to excommunicate Governor Cuomo for his support to the Goebbelsian law allowing infanticide in the State of New York.

Gardening post to come. ~ The Rome parish the pope will be visiting this weekend. (I wonder if he knows its Quinquagesima.) San Crispino da Viterbo at Labaro, a northern suburb of Rome. Quick, what does it remind you of? Yep. Me too.  The Witch King of Angmar’s summer place.   ~