My good friend Ian Corbin offers what he described to me as “a mere diversion” contrasting the brutality of Boston’s ‘Government Center’ with the beauty of Rome’s Piazza San Pietro.

In the Sunday after-church tea-drinking circles of Manhattan, much thought and disputation was provoked by Damian Thompson’s recent revelation that the senator-elect from Florida, Mr. Marco Rubio, is in fact an evangelical Protestant despite his office claiming he is a Catholic. Word comes from Argentina about a member of parliament named Cynthia Hotton, a brazen defender of the right to life and solidarity with the unborn. (more…)

The Royal British Legion, the organisation which supports Britain’s veterans, organises the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The first half of the event is part military tattoo, part popular concert, but the second half is a Christian service of remembrance for the dead of all wars. The Festival takes place the Saturday before Remembrance Sunday: a 2:00pm matinee for the general public, and a 7:00pm one for veterans, servicemen, and their families in the presence of the Royal Family. The 7:00pm festival is broadcast on BBC1 every year, but sadly is not yet simulcast via internet for those abroad. Here are a few YouTube clips from different parts of the service in the past two years. (more…)

As if you needed more reasons to despise Nicolas Sarkozy! Well, this one we can’t even blame on him. Shall I explain? The national flag of France is a tricolour of three equal vertical stripes of blue, white, and red. Excepting the heady days of the Bourbon restoration, this has consistently been the French flag for the past two centuries now. A little while into the Sarkozy presidency, however, I began noticing a change only in the French flag as displayed whenever the President gave a press conference. The white stripe was reduced in width by half and the space on either side given to the neighbouring colours. The obvious deduction made was that the President wanted all three colours of the national flag shown whenever there were close-up press photographs of himself, and research confirms that this is the case. This shows an awareness for visual representation, but is nonetheless a highly unusual assault on the official flag of a nation. (more…)

The University of St Andrews is commencing the celebrations of its 600th anniversary, as the institution was founded in stages between 1410, when teaching started, and 1413, when a bull was issued recognising it as a university by Pedro de Luna, an antipope who styled himself Benedict XIII. Yesterday I attended a fascinating lecture by Dr. John Rao — From the Triple Papacy to the Council of Constance — as part of the 2010–2011 lecture series organised by the Roman Forum.

Boy was Benedict a baddie! Even the council he called passed resolutions condemning him and the cardinals he appointed turned against him. He ended his days maintaining his schismatic claim, holed in island fortress of Peñiscola. The day before he died, he appointed four cardinals, who elected de Luna’s friend Gil Sanchez Muñoz y Carbón as Clement VIII. Or rather, three of the cardinals did while the fourth — Jean Carrier, the archdeacon of Rodez — wasn’t present, so he went and single-handedly elected his sacristan Bernard Garnier as pope, who took the name Benedict XIV.

Garnier was permanently in hiding, and his location was only ever known to Carrier. B-14 did manage to choose four cardinals of his own, and on the antipope’s death they elected Carrier pope, who was inconveniently captured and imprisoned by his rival antipope, Clement VIII. Oddly, having just succeeded the supposed Benedict XIV, Carrier chose to use the name and style Benedict XIV also. A novel by Jean Raspail (L’Anneau du pêcheur) depicts a line of anti-papal successors to the two Benedict XIVs.

As a lecturer, Dr. Rao is both informative and entertaining, and I’d encourage anyone interested to attend the remaining lectures in this year’s series. There’s always wine on offers and little things to nibble on, with a box for generous donations to be made towards the cost of the program. The next lecture is Martin V and the Troubled Return to Rome — this week is the 593rd anniversary of that pope’s election, as it happens.

Also, Dr. David Allen White, retired Professor of World Literature at the United States Naval Academy, returns to New York in December for the Syllabus of Errors Weekend, on the subject of Charles Dickens and the Evils of Modernity. I went to last year’s Syllabus of Errors weekend, and Professor White is entrancingly engaging, a veritable font of knowledge.

Good news from the Middle West: the Catholic chaplaincy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison announced plans for multi-use, high-rise structure in the city built in a traditional style. Matthew Alderman Studios served as the principal designer for the elevations of the St. Paul University Catholic Center, a 14-storey, $45-million structure in a Romanesque-Deco style that will include a chapel, meeting rooms, and student housing.

“Catholic life in Madison has undergone a remarkable renaissance under Bishop Morlino,” Matt Alderman says, “and St. Paul’s is one of the foundations of this resurgence. I can assert from personal experience that it is really heartening what is going on over there. St. Paul’s is molding a new generation of faithful, responsible, and joyfully serious young Catholics.”

Matt noted that the concept for the St. Paul Center is reminiscent of the skyscraper-church designs mooted during the first half of the twentieth century. In most of those proposals, however, the skyscraper factor tended to overwhelm the ecclesiastical visuality of the overall design. Matt has deftly avoided this in the St. Paul plans: from the perspective of the man on the street, the most prominent part of the façade is obviously ecclesiastical, and the many storeys above flow naturally, but unobtrusively, therefrom.

“It was important to impart an ecclesiastical character to the principal facade while at the same time asserting the building’s mixed-use status. In my own sketches, I drew on the work of Ralph Adams Cram at Christ Church Methodist in New York, a rugged urban ecclesiastical plant with a great deal of dignity and personality, and Bertram Goodhue’s slightly earlier St. Bartholomew’s, just down the street on Park Avenue.”

RDG Design and Planning of Omaha acted as principal architects of record. Matt Alderman is not yet an architect officially — the certification process in America is wisely prolonged — but as a design consultant he’s already serving up enough to whet our appetite. Diocesan chancelleries, parish boards, heck, anyone who wants to build anything: keep this guy in mind!

With a bit of time to spare between the rugby match and dinner, we discovered a friend of ours was exploring the newly renovated headquarters of the Yale Daily News and were invited to join in. The handsome gothic structure is now overshadowed by an ugly extension to the previously ugly Yale School of Architecture, widely believed to be the ugliest building in town. Henry Luce paid for the YDN building out of his own pocket in memory of his Yale classmate Briton Hadden, who died just 31 years old. The place went up in 1932 and underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation over the summer, and the place was looking good. (more…)

An example of the ‘Lazarus bling’, more medals than you can shake a stick at.

From the blog of John Smeaton we read that the former Irish president (and genial enemy of all that is good and holy) Mary Robinson has received a ‘knighthood’. Last month she was invested as a Dame in the self-styled ‘Order of St. Lazarus’, a fake order of knighthood. The group claims links to the old Order of St. Lazarus of which the last remnants faded away in the 1780s.

The current ‘Order’ was founded as a fake order of knighthood in 1910 by the confidence trickster Jean-Joseph Moser, and has grown by perhaps surprising leaps and bounds in the past few decades, taking into account P. T. Barnum’s famous maxim about a sucker being born every minute. The group has split into various factions and it has become notorious for having members in its ranks who don more metal “bling” than rap stars or Soviet generals.

The so-called Order of St. Lazarus exists throughout Europe and the Spanish- and English-speaking countries abroad, including the United States. The French branch of St. Lazarus was forced by the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour to cease claiming to be an ‘order’, and members of the Order of Malta are forbidden from participating in St. Lazarus’s activities.

“The Order’s pretensions have been strongly condemned by the Holy See as aiming to replace ‘the legitimate forms of chivalric awards’,” according to Guy Stair Sainty, the acknowledged expert on these somewhat arcane affairs. Nonetheless, Guy points out that “supporters of Saint Lazarus include the heads of a handful of great noble families and, over the years, several leading Churchmen and Cardinals”.

“The Order of Saint Lazarus, although it is to be complimented for its considerable charitable efforts (notably in Germany), need not pretend to an historical continuity to which its claims, at the very least, are unsubstantiated,” Guy Stair Sainty concludes. “Were it to assume the character of a private association, founded in 1910, to emulate the traditions of the ancient crusader Order, it could deflect much of the hostility it has attracted… It would be much more successful and be more readily welcomed into the wider community of international humanitarian bodies, however, if it was to permit an honest appraisal of its origins.”

Over the course of this week our little corner of the web will feature a series of posts relating to Mexico, the great American nation which this year commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of its war of independence. That revolt was begun by a heretic priest, Miguel Hidalgo, under the influence of the contemptible ideas of “the Enlightenment”, but he nonetheless marched under the banner of the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe, who is venerated to this day as Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas. This curious rebel presaged so much of the history of Mexico: rebellion and devotion, religion and irreligion.

Our ‘Mexico Week’ is not intended to give any sanction to rebel priests or violent revolt against legitimate authority, but we instead aim to take this opportunity to display to readers some of the greatness of this brilliant yet troubled nation, oft forgotten due to its rather famous and prominent neighbour to the north.

Growing up in the United States, as I did, Mexico was (and still is) often written off as a place of drug killings and drunk American college students. But digging beneath the surface one easily discovers a Mexico rich in story. ‘Mexico Week’ will by no means be a comprehensive survey of the country, its history, and traditions, but rather a little cabinet of curiosities, a Mexican miscellany if you will.

Burma Colony (1937–1948)

State of Burma (1943–1945)

Union of Burma (1948–1974)

Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (1974–1988) and Union of Myanmar (1988–2010)

The military government of Burma (officially ‘Myanmar’) unveiled a new flag for the southeast-Asian country last week. The new design (above) rejects the general form of Burmese national flags since the country was granted independence from Great Britain in 1948, but instead harkens back to the ‘State of Burma’, a puppet regime set up by the Japanese to integrate Burma into their ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’.

Somewhat paradoxically, the Minister of Defence in the puppet ‘State of Burma’ was General Aung Sang, the father of Aung Sang Suu Kyi, pro-democracy activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Aung Sang Suu Kyi is the most prominent leader of the opposition to the military junta that rules Burma, and has spent fourteen of the past twenty years either in jail or under house arrest.

The flag change is part of a transition period devised by the military junta in their attempt to reform the country into a managed democracy that will be less isolated from the rest of the world without threatening the junta’s grasp on power.

Burma became a British possession in 1824, and was made a province of the Empire of India in 1886. In 1937 the province was separated from India, excluding it from the reforms aimed at eventually granting dominion status to the sub-continent but also introducing important reforms for Burma, including an elected assembly with a prime minister. The country saw some of the heaviest fighting during the Second World War, but the forces of the Japanese puppet regime, the ‘State of Burma’ eventually saw the tide turning against the Empire of Japan and switched sides to join the British and Indian armies under Lord Mountbatten.

A Rejected Proposal for St. Mary’s Anglican Church

We rarely mention Johannesburg on this little corner of the web because our mother taught us that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. While ruffling through the archives the other day, however, I came across this design for the Johannesburg cathedral of the Church of the Province of South Africa. George Halford Fellowes Prynne (1853–1927) was an accomplished Gothic architect whose work is mostly found in the south of England. He’s notable for his rood screens in particular, worked in a variety of forms and materials (wood, stone, and metal), though this design employs a hanging rood. (more…)

WHETHER Parliament approves “therapeutic cloning” or not, will it make any difference in the long run? Whatever scientists can do, that will be done. Public opinion, at first aghast at artificial insemination and other landmarks on this infernal road, has largely come to accept them. So it is likely to be with this latest triumph.

“Science has put into our hands innumerable gifts that we can use either for good or ill.” This mantra, once regularly intoned, has become less popular now that many of these gifts are plainly seen to be used for ill.

A new palliative has appeared instead: it says that we must be kept well informed about the latest scientific developments, as well as learning more about science and scientific methods, so that we can decide for ourselves whether we want these gifts or not.

But who are “we”? Would it make any difference if we said we did not want them? Would it make any difference if some scientists themselves decided they were too dangerous to proceed with? Others would somehow, somewhere, carry on the work. The progress of science and technology which has seized upon our world seems irreversible, even fated.

Will it, as in some environmentalist fantasy, gradually diminish in strength and become humanly manageable in a new, green and “sustainable” world? Or will it, as seems more likely, proceed to a catastrophic end?

I REMEMBER, shortly after President Mbeki’s resignation, conversing with a friend of mine, an Afrikaner vrou more advanced in years & experience than I. In response to my expression of ‘good riddance’ to an administration marked mostly by a detached aloofness and a willingness to abuse the prosecutorial system, this creature of the soil replied calmly, “Ah, but we will learn to miss Mr. Mbeki.” And, while I trust the instincts of Mr. Zuma more than the education of Mr. Mbeki, listening to the 1996 speech in which the latter commended the Constitution Bill to the National Assembly I can at least concede readily the eloquence of the former president.

The excerpt above was produced by South African Tourism, and ably displays the beauty of the country — “the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas, and the ever changing seasons” as Mr. Mbeki put it — and its people: the riders on Noordhoek strand, the Dutch Reformed predikant, the proud Coloured fisherman, the Xhosa women with their pipes, a Zionist baptism on the shore, the Durban party girls driving down the boulevard. South Africa is a country that sells itself; when it’s bloody, it’s bloody, but when it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

In an article about the soon-to-be-canonised Australian nun, Mary McKillop, the Daily Telegraph exhibits a peculiar example of the lows of newspaper journalism today.

The headline boldly states “Australian nun ‘to be made patron saint of abuse victims'” only for the sub-headline — “An Australian nun who will be canonised by the Pope next month should be made the patron saint of clerical sex abuse victims, Catholics have suggested.” — to directly contradict this.

Is Mary McKillop “to be” the patron saint of the abused or has it merely been “suggested”? The headline-writer put the ‘to be’ in quotation marks, but the article doesn’t supply a single quotation or piece of evidence showing this decision has been reached, only a quotation suggesting it would be a wise course of action.

I’ve read numerous examples of newspaper articles offering contradictory facts unreconciled, but to do so before the article has even started seems particularly bizarre.

The Late, Lamented Sporting Life, Daily Newspaper of the Queen Mum

THE MOST FAVOURED daily reading material of the late Queen Mother, The Sporting Life did not survive into the twenty-first century, unlike the beloved former consort (who died 102 years of age in 2002). It was first printed in 1859, but through its 1886 acquisition of Bell’s Life in London, and Sporting Chronicle had a heritage dating back to 1822. Throughout the twentieth century, aside from being the racing newspaper of record, reading it gave a certain connotation of leisureliness, spiviness, or both. By the 1980s, it was thought the Life was getting a bit staid, and it was challenged when Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum founded the Racing Post as a daily competitor.

“The advent of the Racing Post in the 1980s was good for the Life,” Jamie Reid wrote after the older journal shut. “The old paper was in danger of becoming tired. What makes the Life’s closure so hard to take is that in the last few years it was better than ever.”

“The Post‘s editorial style was often a bit dry whereas the Life’s top writers… were clearly not good for you at all. They were basted in alcohol, toasted in tobacco and in constant desperate need of a winning tip.”

That the long tradition of The Sporting Life didn’t have to end is one of the more frustrating aspects: it was the Life’s owners, Trinity Mirror, that bought the Post in 1998 and decided to keep the title of the twelve-year-old paper instead of the one with one-hundred-and-forty-nine years of history behind it. Go figure.

If you can possibly ignore its blood-soaked foundation and its disregard for the freedom of the Church, one can appreciate that the French Republic does republicanism with a dash of pizzazz, as evidenced by the late Philippe Séguin’s official robes as President of the Cour des comptes. Of course, most of this panache it inherited from its intermittent monarchic and (even more so) imperial past. It also inherited from Louis XIV an ever-present spirit of centralisation — the Republic frowns upon the principle of subsidiarity.

Monsieur Séguin was a decent sort. (more…)

In addition to its coat of arms, the College of William & Mary makes good use of the royal cypher of its eponymous monarchs, as seen above, in a version used by the whole university (it is a ‘college’ only in name), and below in a variant used by the William & Mary Rowing Club.

THE EAST NEUK of Fife is one of my favourite little corners of the globe, in what is definitely my favourite country in the world. Here are a set of almost unspoilt little fishing villages with a quite localised architectural style that makes them instantly recognisable. The name of this little regionlet signifies its location as the east ‘nook’ of the Kingdom of Fife, that juts out into the North Sea.

Those concerned for this part of the world might be interested in signing up for the East Neuk of Fife Preservation Society, which has completed admirable work all over the East Neuk, and is currently considering the restoration of the gatehouse of Pittenweem Priory.

One of the things I enjoy about watching older movies is seeing the newspapers they mocked up for them. “The Pink Panther” (1963) featured this shot of an underworld figure reading the Rome Daily American on a Paris bridge or quayside.

Often these are mockups of newspapers that never existed, but the Rome Daily American was real. A handful of GIs started it in 1945 when the European edition of Stars and Stripes ceased publication. It took the Herald-Tribune two days to reach Rome from Paris in those days, and the CIA held an arms-length 40% stake of the ownership until the 1970s.

The paper was made famous by the 1953 flick Roman Holiday — there was a charming film. Its offices were in the Via di Santa Maria in via, parallel to the Corso, until the paper went bankrupt in 1984.

What are the best ways of following the Pope’s visit to Great Britain? The official website is offering a live webcast of all events, with highlights from the day interspersed between events. The Daily Telegraph is live-blogging the papal events each day, with frequent updates; today can be found here. The Catholic Herald is also live-blogging the Papal Visit, and updates on today’s events can be found here.

Check catholicherald.co.uk and telegraph.co.uk for more throughout the visit.

Instagram: @andcusack

Most Recent Posts

• A Christmas Gift from the Governor December 24, 2024
• Oude Kerk, Amsterdam December 24, 2024
• Gellner’s Prague December 19, 2024
• Monsieur Bayrou December 18, 2024
• Dempsey Heiner, Art Critic December 17, 2024

Most Recent Comments

• Andrew Cusack on Amsterdam
• Andrew Cusack on Season’s Greetings from the Seventh
• B T Van Nostrand on Season’s Greetings from the Seventh
• Gousset van Heel on Amsterdam
• Andrew Cusack on Amsterdam
• Adam Rhéaume on Le drapeau « Jacques Cartier »
• John Lannigan on No. 82, Eaton Square
• Gousset van Heel on Amsterdam
• Frédéric-Nicolas Gerace on The Last Will and Testament of Louis XVI
• Peter Forster on The Catholic Apostolic Church, Edinburgh

Book Wishlist

Monthly Archives

Categories