My father and grandfather, City Hall Park, April 1954.

Previously: Grandpa

A Selection of Quotations from Il Duce

“The Socialists ask us for our program?
Our program is to smash the heads of the Socialists.”

Mussolini himself had been a very prominent Socialist, working for leftist newspapers and was even once deported from Italy when his anti-Catholicism and anti-royalism became too much for the authorities to handle. (more…)

I HAD HOPED to provide you with photos of my graduation shortly after it occurred, but that was over a year ago and I am only now getting to it. My write-up about the proceedings can be found here, so these photos are essentially an accompaniment to that previous post.

The graduation ceremony took place in the Younger Hall, the red-tiled classical building in the photos above and below. Also below, the University Chapel, with St. Salvator’s Quad adjacent to it. The curved building in the upper left is St. Salvator’s Hall, my home during my final year. In between the Chapel and the Younger Hall is College Gate, which houses the main administrative offices of the University.

AMONG THE CURIOSITIES held in the St Andrews University Museum is the death mask of Pedro de Luna (1328-1423), one of the Avignon antipopes, who styled himself Benedict XIII. De Luna issued bulls granting university status to the group of scholars at St Andrews, and thus the Universitas Doctorum Magistrorum et Scholarum Sancti Andreae apud Scotos was born. The bulls were later confirmed by Pope Martin V, whose election ended the Great Western Schism. De Luna’s name lives on at St Andrews in the University’s coat of arms: the chief of the shield features a crescent, punning on the Antipope’s last name, which of course is Spanish for ‘moon’.

EVERY NOW AND THEN, there is a minor hubbub; perhaps not even enough to be called a hubbub, but call it a hubbub we shall. The hubbub in question is on the subject of James II (seen above, with his father Charles I), our last Catholic king, and the man who (as Duke of York) gave his name to the great city and land of New York. We have previously expounded upon King James on this little corner of the web, but fresh notice was brought by Fr. Nicholas Schofield on his Roman Miscellany blog. In the blog post A Royal Penitent, Fr. Nicholas writes: (more…)

AROUND THIS TIME of year we like to remind our dear readers that out there in the countryside the fox-hunting season has commenced. Charles Moore reports in the Spectator that “there have now been several convictions under the Hunting Act,” the Quantock Staghounds being the most recent victims. “This week, the wretched Ann Widdecombe held a meeting in the House of Commons in which she showed police officers and others a film about how the ban is, in her view, being flouted. Politics has only to change a bit,” Moore continues, “for the police to turn nasty. If politics changes the other way, and there is a Conservative government (no Widdecombe, thank God: she is retiring), the promise of repeal must be cashed in straightaway.” Don’t hold your breath, Mr. Moore!

Of course, the season has begun in earnest not only in Great Britain & Ireland but also here in the New World. The Montreal Hunt Club is the oldest hunt in existence on these shores, having been founded back in 1826. (The same year as the Old Guard of the City of New York). For many years, the club lead a triple life as a social organization, a hunt, and even as a military unit, the Royal Montreal Cavalry. The guidon of the Royal Montreal Calvary was presented by the Earl of Dalhousie in 1828 and is the oldest in Canada. (It is currently housed in the armory of the Royal Canadian Hussars, the successor unit to the Royal Montreal Cavalry).

Whilst perambulating the internet the other day I stumbled upon this 1880s evening coat of the Montreal Hunt Club, amongst the collection of the McCord Museum. The accompanying notes, of course, get quite anthropological:

In The British Empire in the Nineteenth Century: Its Progress and Expansion at Home and Abroad, Comprising a Description and History of the British Colonies and Dendencies (1898), Edgar Sanderson writes in his entry on Quebec that “the Montreal Hunt Club affords the best sport of its kind in America.” Happily, the Montreal Hunt Club carries on its activities to this very day. While it originally drew its members from the Anglophone portion of the city’s elite, French speakers began to dominate the club from the post-war period onwards. (Accordingly, its official legal names is “Le Club de Chasse à Courre de Montréal”). We hope and pray that as the Montreal Hunt has carried on from centuries past, it will continue to carry on into the future.

Not long ago I signed up for a trial subscription to the National Catholic Register, and while it certainly exceeds the other national Catholic newspapers on presentation, it lacks the weight of the Wanderer. A quick glance in the October 28, 2007 edition makes this clear. I speak, namely, of the article “Knights Templar: More Than the Stuff of Fiction”. The article points out that the Order of the Knights Templar was “founded in Jerusalem in 1118 to protect Christian pilgrims and defend the Christian presence in the Holy Land. … It was suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312, following accusation of heresy against its members, and subsequently became the focus of legends and mysteries, most recently the outrageously inaccurate Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.” The article then mentioned the recent rediscovery in the Vatican Archives of a document relating to the Knights Templar. All fair enough, up to now.

The Register‘s correspondent “spoke last month in Rome with Patrick Rae, a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army Reserve who serves as Grand Commander of the Knights Templar.” Huh? What? Was it not just stated that the Knights Templar were suppressed by Pope Clement V in 1312? The Register offers no help in explaining this discrepancy to us. General Rae, however, later informs us that the Knights Templar “reconstituted as a French order under Napoleon and from that day until today it has existed, an unbroken string”. This is rather mixing fact and fiction.

1) The Knights Templar no longer exist. They were suppressed by the Pope in the fourteenth century and not revived.

2) The group of which Patrick Rae is Grand Commander is an organization called the “Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani” (OSMTH) also known by its English name of the “Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem” (SMOTJ). It is neither sovereign, nor is it an order, but is instead a Christian ecumenical aid organization which styles itself an order.

3) There are dozens, if not hundreds, of groups going around calling themselves the Order of Knights Templar. In actual fact, they are not orders (they are merely ordinary associations, like a chess club or your friendly local circle of stamp-collectors) and they are not Templar (since the Templars no longer exist).

It is beyond me why the Register‘s correspondent chose to speak with the head of this particular Templar-style group out of the hundreds of Templar-style groups. Perhaps the correspondent was impressed by the UN’s recognition of the OSMTH with special consultative status. This status has also been granted to many other groups, such as the Rotary Club of Kathmandu, the Tunisian Mothers Association, and the Boy Scouts of America. But the reporter makes no real attempt to point out that the Knights Templar in question are not, in fact, the Knights Templar (which, again, no longer exist). Whether he is disingenuous or merely ignorant is up to question (in a spirit of Christian charity, let us assume the latter). However there can be no question that this is simply sloppy journalism.

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
Chapman & Hall, London, 1938

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