RIP Christopher Hitchens.
The quote below is from Peter's remembrance of his brother.

From Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings,
out to the undiscovered ends,
there’s nothing worth the wear of winning
but laughter and the love of friends’

Benedicamus Domino!

Vir optimus bene de Ecclesia meritus requiescat in pace Domini

Laszlo Kiss, of divinumofficium.com, returned home to the Father.

Psalm 130

Out of the depths I have cried to Thee, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice.
Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
If Thou, O Lord, shalt observe iniquities; Lord, who shall endure it?
For with Thee there is merciful forgiveness:
and by reason of Thy law, I have waited for Thee, O Lord.
My soul hath relied on His word; my soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord.
Because with the Lord there is mercy, and with Him plentiful redemption.
And He shall redeem Israel from all her iniquities.


Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.

Let us pray:
O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all the faithful,
grant to the souls of Thy servants departed the remission of all their sins,
that through our pious supplication they may obtain that pardon
which they have always desired;
who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

Mr. Laszlo Kiss may your soul rest in the peace of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
My prayers are with your family.

Many thanks to Rorate Caeli and especially Anonymous commenter at 17 August, 2011 12:15, who's comment is reproduced above....

Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor

And the night slowly envelopes the christian world - flickering lights like meteorites produce short lived streaks of sparks on the steadily greying sky; the cathedrals of old left to decay empty while the remnant gathering their tiny congregations in homes and makeshift chapels. The catacombs return:

Amerio quotes Isaias:

Custos, quid de nocte?
custos, quid de nocte?
Dixit custos:
Venit mane et nox;
si quæritis, quærite;
convertimini, venite.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers prepare for the feast of our Lord's birthday, interrupting advent penitence with rejoicing this coming Gaudete Sunday!

Ash Wednesday

Thus, Lent begins, the sacrifice of the faithful takes on a holy character and the smudge of honor announces the coming judgement...

Benedicamus Domino!

Saint Lucia pray for us!

Here you may find the delightful lussekatter and glogg, in honor of the Sicilian Saint!
May the True Faith return to Sweden and Norway by the intercessions of Saints Brigitta and Lucia!

More on Demography

As Spengler pointed out with others -most notably in agreement with Gibbon - Rome has lost 90% of its population between the Augustininan age and by the time the Huns appeared at the gates, turned back miraculously by the exhortations of the Pope.

Gibbon attributes the decline to Christianity, but it is not the generally accepted view, most moderns favouring economics to transcendence. Nevertheless, Gibbon is mostly right, although not in the way he himself understood his argument.

Christianity sapped the strength of the pagans, not the christians. Without the Faith, they lost the will to live and reproduce, having no children, they disappeared and the Christians won by default, they were the last men standing. As the Lord himself taught, few are the saved and many are the lost to perdition. So, the ten percent of the population kept the commandments, was fruitful and multiplied, and by the time of Attila, they were the only ones left.

Something similar is happening today. The west's post-christian - or neo-pagan - population is rapidly disappearing, and only the real faithful christians and the muslims who never accepted modernity will be left in the future. The secularists and faithless are doomed to disappear.

Thy will be done!
Benedicamus Domino!

Comments on Mark Steyn's America Alone

Steyn deals with the demographic but consistently misses out on the underlying loss of soul of the western civilization. He sees it, calls it "Post Christian", worries about the "welfare state" aspects, but still stops short of the main cause:

Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt!

"...Not merely the importance but the very existence of industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously schooled brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine's master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails - this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine - the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can-do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) - then nothing can hinder the end of this great drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries."

In another chapter Oswald Spengler continues:

"...When reason have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself" - they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful...

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which last for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements...

Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings. Samarra was abndoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka's capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez's time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and hermae. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable."

Although I have a catholic viewpoint on world-history and identify with the "fellaheen" of Spengler, his words are wise and prophetic beyond belief.