Adam Child’s playful take on women’s dressing, or dressing down, provides a humorous side to the debate on modesty, which does play in some way into the #MeToo movement. We are fallen creatures, with what the Catechism calls ‘concupiscence’; that is, our passions move in ways contrary to reason, at times violently so, without our willing such, one of the consequences of original sin (which John Henry Newman described as one of the more obvious of revealed truths, even to the most atheist of atheists). The more we exacerbate these disordered movements of our appetites, the more out-of-control they get, until in the end they dominate reason, and make us act in ways that are decidedly irrational, lustful, even bestial. And modesty, or the lack thereof, not ‘unveiling what should remain hidden’, is one way to help keep the passions in check, or not. Fallen nature is what it is, regardless of what the ‘elites’ might say.
So Doug Ford has won the Conservative leadership. Hmm. I may have more to write on this, but one thing for now is that he is going to have to carry the reputational baggage of his deceased brother, requiescat in pace, whom he resembles, as brothers often do. Is Ford a conservative? There is not much, and not many, that are conservative anymore, in any true, Edmund Burke-sense of that term, including the Conservative Party, but things can change and develop, especially in a Newtonian reaction to the increasingly insane policies of the Liberals (who, as I will never tire of repeating, are anything but ‘liberal’).
And on that note, an article in today’s National Post corroborates my point that the Liberals, at both levels of government, can more or less rig elections, being able by legislative fiat (that is, budgets) to buy our votes with our own money or, as I put it more accurately, to purchase the votes of some with the hard-earned money of others. Alas. We seem to be in a descending vicious circle, a labyrinth with no good end-point.
While on end-points, Ireland has set May 25th for its referendum on abortion ‘rights’, claiming that it is an unjust burden to have women travel to Britain to ‘terminate’ their pregnancies. Of course, as Pope John Paul firmly taught, moral principles cannot be decided my majority vote, especially the right to life. Again, alas. As we approach the feast of Saint Patrick, we should ponder what faith means, not just in the Emerald Isle, but in all nations on earth. As Leo XIII wrote in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei (on the relations between Church and State), a country without religion (and he means the one true Catholic religion) can never be well governed. In fact, if we return to the teaching of Pope John Paul, a democracy without values quickly descends into a thinly-veiled totalitarianism, which is where Canada and Ireland and host of other countries are quickly headed.
May 25th is the memorial of Saint Bede the Venerable (+735), who by his saintly, reflective, dedicated, monastic life helped keep the faith alive in the midst of what have rather inaptly come to be called the ‘Dark Ages’, but wherein the faith in fact burned quite brightly, here and there, not least in the monastery of Jarrow in north-east England, where Father Bede spent most of his earthly existence, faithful to his rule, considered the ‘most learned man of his time’. Let’s hope from his current home in heaven he teaches his Irish brethren a few things about the inviolable sanctity of human life .
A blessed and fruitful continued Lententide to one and all.