Lunar Skeletons

There are many towns in Southern California, where I grew up. And when I was young, they really seemed like separate and distinct places. Back then, many years ago, the towns didn't have the "geography of nowhere" about them. When you went from one to go to another, it felt like you actually went somewhere that was different from where you came from. For example, unlike Rialto, where I lived, San Bernardino felt like a much different place. To get to San Bernardio, as when my mother and father gathered us children into the old grey Dodge to go and buy clothes for school at J.C. Pennys, or to visit my mother's parents, who kept a small dairy, or to visit my mother's sister Ethylen, whom I called "Auntie", we would take what seemed to me like a long drive down Arrow Route towards downtown San Bernardino, passing miles of orange groves along the way, the giant eucalyptus trees with their aged, seemingly ancient, gnarled or drooping limbs and slender aromatic leaves, then the wildish expanse of what were commonly called the Sand Dunes, and next the chasm-like aquaduct which channeled Lytle Creek wash down towards that joke of a river, the Santa Ana. Now, the first thing to which we came, that distinctly and absolutely delineated the boundary dividing from where we were coming from where we were going, was the wing of the enormous, sprawling Santa Fe railyards which jutted up from the southwest from Colton. There we would have to stop and carefully, slowly cross many lines of tracks before proceeding. And sometimes we would have to wait some time, delayed in our journey, while a long line of freight cars would slowly lumber past us, headed perhaps towards the El Cajon pass, out to the Mojave Desert. (Later on, a very large overpass was built over the tracks.) For what distinguish San Bernardino, what made it a different place, in fact and in feel, were three, very large things: the enormous Santa Fe railyards and shops with its giant concrete smokestack which towered above them like a great, mysterious obelisk; and Norton Air Force base, which covered the eastern end of town; and still farther east, like a great unknowable, inescapable presence, which stood unchanging over the years, mount San Bernardino and mount San Gorgonio. They are two of several peaks that formed part of the San Bernardino range, which makes up that fold of the earth separating the Southern California basin from the vast Mojave Desert to the north. The range stabs eastward into the desert and diminishes steadily in size until it finally becomes just a collection of barren, undistinguished desert hills in the vicinity of Palm Springs called, prosaically enough, the Little San Bernardino Mountains. But from where I lived in Rialto, looking out my living room window eastward, the angle of perspective made those two great mountains to be seen as merging together, as if they were really one single mountain, though in reality the peaks were divided apart by many miles by what is called the San Gorgonio Wilderness. But most people, living below the mountains in San Bernardino and Rialto, thought of them as simply one mountain, refering to it as San Gorgonio, which was the taller of the two at about eleven thousand feet above sea level. At its peak, San Gorgonio is rocky, treeless and barren, and it is the namesake of an obscure Roman martyr, Saint Gorgonius, whose feastday is September 9th, who was, though he had once been a court favorite, hanged to death by Emperor Diocletian in the year 303 A.D. In the winters, San Gorgonio is always snow covered. And from the distance always had the dark and etherial bluish tint about it.

Rialto, the much smaller town, where I lived until around 1969, lying west of San Bernardino, was distinguished mostly by its many orange groves and eucalyptus trees. But San Bernardino was the "big city" for me and my siblings; it had the tall buildings, where Rialto had none. San Bernardino had much more shopping, such as the J.C. Pennys and Woolworths. And, since there were no shopping malls then, the downtown district of San Bernardino was always crowded with people using the sidewalks to go about their business. I remember as a child spending hours with my parents and grandparents walking about those sidewalks. But all of that which I remembered, the things which really accounted for distinct and vivid memories, disappeared long ago. As the towns in Southern California overgrew their boundaries, they began to merge one into the other and began to mostly look like one another. They simply became names on a map, mere municiple districts artificially drawn on top on one sprawling and homogeneous megalopolis. Though there are plenty of names — Glendale, Fontana, Pasadena, Bloomington, Rialto, Upland, Ontario, Cucamonga, Montclair, Pomona, West Covina, Baldwin Park, Diamond Bar, Fullerton, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Buena Park, and so on — the names really began to mean nothing, designated nothing, and nothing worth remembering attaches to them. There are dozens and dozens of names, but none of them really mean anything any longer. To be in any one of them is practically the same as to be in any of the others. They all look the same — the same shopping malls, the same superabundance of strip malls, the same unending rows of suburban housing tracts, all tied together by the same congested freeways, streets and intersections. When one travels those monotonous freeways, the names will pass by, duely and dully noted, on the highway signs, but looking outward across the passing landscape nothing really changes; the same scenery is always there, is everywhere, is never ending.

I love orange marmalade on wheat toast. Why? I guess perhaps the odor and flavor of it reminds me of my childhood, growing up in Southern California back in the 1950s. Back then oranges were still being grown there, and in all directions from my childhood home on Tamarisk Avenue, there were still alive orange groves. They were close by, close enough so it was a just short walk even for a young child. And back then, unlike nowdays, parents did not need to be so concerned about where their children were playing. So often I would run off to play in the orange groves. And even to this day playing in the orange groves is still a vivid memory for me, probably the most vivid thing I can remember from so long ago. Even by that time, most of the orange groves were no longer then being worked for the fruit, but somehow the trees were watered enough to keep them alive. The groves were often overgrown with thick grass, and the trees were no longer being pruned, becoming unkempt and wild and intertwined with one another. And in the grass, like some sort of archeological relics poking up from the sandy soil, were the many concrete irrigation pipeworks. Almost all the orchards were surrounded by giant eucalyptus trees, which acted as wind breaks against the strong winds we sometimes had in Southern California. Thus, the orange groves became for us children like a strange world of its own, a forest full of mysteries to be discovered. In the spring, when the trees would blossom, they gave off a sweet and unforgetable fragrance that filled the air everywhere you went. When I smell orange marmalade, it reminds me of that sweet fragrance.

Now, the orange groves have long since disappeared from most of Southern California, plowed under to make way for more housing subdivisions. Because of the increasingly high cost of watering the groves, it became more profitable for the land owners to stop harvesting oranges and to sell off their orchards. The trees would no longer be watered, and they would die. The bulldozers would come, and one by one, they would scrape the skeleton trees off the land into big piles, which were either burned or trucked to the dump, as I recall. And so the fragrance of orange blossoms that once filled the air is just a memory now from long ago. The orchards were already long gone by the time, ten years ago now, when I moved to North Idaho, an area where oranges would never be able to grow because of the colder climate. But I can still put orange marmalade on my toast. I guess the oranges used to make it might have come from Florida or maybe somewhere in South America.

I think there's not much point in continuing to follow the Fátima story, because, first of all, there's very little chance of ever getting to the bottom of it, especially considering that the Vatican is an institution that for its utter lack of transparency rates right up there with the old time Kremlim of Soviet days. So what's really going on? I don't think there is really any way to know. Vaticanologists might speculate. But it does illustrate one thing for me at least: much of what comes out of Rome nowdays is nothing but spiritual confusion. I can say that I don't place much stock in the hot tub "ecumenicalism" and internationalism that some of the mucky-mucks in the Vatican love to promote. But how much power and control these mucky-mucks really have is anyone's guess.

Some Catholics, such as Euodia, are also horrified by much of what they see coming out of Rome. In Euodia's case, she seems to think that by diligently searching the Internet for everything having to do with occultism and Masonry, she can somehow find an explanation for what's going on and uncover the real conspiracy behind it all. But delving into the garbage that occultists love to endlessly babble about is not a healthy endeavor for anyone; few can undertake such a occupation and not be adversely affected by it. Occultists always love to boast about how important and influential they are and how deep and profound their "secret wisdom" is. And they are not above lying about what great things they have accomplished. The great danger in continually reading occultist poppycock is one of taking it at face value all too easily. I really feel sorry for Euodia, and I think she is making a big mistake and is chasing the wind.

Another observation I have concerns blogging and blogs. After sailing for a while the Blogific Ocean, I think I've been seasoned enough to reach the conclusion that it truely is a vast sea of flotsam and jetsam. Ninety-nine percent of blogs are worthless dreck. Though there is the small one percent that is worthwhile, finding it is truely a wearisome task. There might sparkle a few gems here or there, but one must first grind through tons and tons of worthless tailings in order to find them.

Anyhow, I think that I want to take my blog in a different direction, but what that would be I'm not entirely sure. I certainly don't have the time and resources to be a news oriented blog, like the famous InstaPundit for example. Perhaps what I will talk about is life here in this small corner of "fly-over country" that is North Idaho, and how life here is very different from what I previously knew in Southern California. It was this October that marked my tenth year anniversary of when my wife and I left everthing behind to move to North Idaho.

Or perhaps I might start posting portions of my fictional story I am working on, called Apocalypse Replayed, which concerns things like outsourcing to India, Microsoft, The Bohemian Grove, sailing ships in the Caribbean Sea, computer security, the collapse of the Internet, and a programmer in Bombay, India, named Umma Shoujmarana. I sometimes dream about being a published author, but whether I will ever become one I don't know.

It is a beautiful day outside. We were hit with our first real snow this week, and I have about six inches out on my yard. Temperature-wise it's in the teens right now, but it's very sunny, making the snow dazzling for its pure whiteness. The pines are wearing fluffles of snow in their limbs.

The Fátima story has taken another interesting twist. According to totalcatholic.com, Archbh. Michael L. Fitzgerald is downplaying what was reported. Here is an except: — Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to the story, which is becoming a very strange story indeed! First of all, the interreligious meeting at Paul VI Pastoral Centre at Fátima was barely reported at all. But now that the word has finally gotten out, it raised enough of a stink that Fitzgerald, who is the President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, found it necessary to try to play the whole thing down.

It looks like Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald is turning up quite a bit in the news. It seems that Zenit.org is reporting "Holy See Preparing New Document on Interreligious Dialogue I am beginning to think that my original guess is shaping up to be correct, that the event at Fátima fully had the PP's backing and is an expression of his thinking. The article in La Civiltà Cattolica was merely a diversion, or perhaps the minority viewpoint being allowed to let off some steam. It will be very interesting to see what this document ends up saying once it's released. Can it be a mere coincidence that this story came out so soon after the event in Fátima?
" (Buenos Aires, Nov 19, 2003, Code: ZE03111905). Unfortunately, because of its paranoid editorial control, Zenit doesn't offer any help in providing any back links to their stories, but I think I got the link correct. Anyhow, here is a excerpt: —

This is very interesting. According to the Zenit.org the "Vatican Message to Muslims at Conclusion of Ramadan From President of Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
" was written by Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald (Nov 17, 2003, Code: ZE03111705). But this is the same Michael L. Fitzgerald who turned up at the interreligious assembly at Fátima.

Front Page Online has published an editorial, dated Nov. 15th, affirming that the stories they published earlier about the Fátima conference were indeed factual. According to the editors: "In some cases this incredulity has led to readers questioning the reality of our Fátima report. We can assure them that the report is factual and reflects the main thrust of the congress — the coming together of the world’s religions under one umbrella." Also, the editors also said that they had no idea why the story is so little reported elsewhere. The fact that it is so under-reported is even more remarkable than the story itself.

Though the "Holy Roman Emperor" may rule imperiously over his little half-acre of blogdom, really it is Lileks who is the Supreme Ruling Deity of the Entire Blogoverse.

This story reported by Front Page Online is very peculiar in at least one regard: I can find virtually no independent sources for the story. I have used Googleâ„¢ in various ways trying to find something about it from an alternate source, and not merely a secondary source that's simply repeating the Front Page Online articles.

Also, I checked the WCRP web site, and there was no mention there of it having any involvement with anything happening in Portugal. And I even e-mailed WCRP and asked for some verification concerning its involvement, but so far I have not received any answer.

However, it seems that the only alternative source for anything about this story is one posted by www.dici.org, entitled "Account of the interreligious assembly of Fatima," which is dated November 3, 2003.

This is an excerpt from that article at www.dici.org: —

"From October 10 to 12 in Fatima, in the Paul VI Pastoral Center, an assembly was held entitled Man's Present, God's Future — The Place of Shrines in Relation to the Sacred. The bishop of Leiria-Fatima opened the assembly and the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon concluded the so-called 'scientific' part. On Sunday, the moderator of the day was the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialog (Msgr. Michael Louis Fitzgerald). Then came the pastoral part. Each of the representatives of shrines of different religions gave their testimony to the assembly. The list was ample: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and Catholicism."

Now www.dici.org describes itself as "the press agency of the Mother House of the Priestly Society Saint Pius X (SSPX)." Even if the mere mention of SSPX causes some Catholics to cringe, because they consider it a schismatic group, I think this might be an independent confirmation of the Front Page Online story. And that is mainly because SSPX claimed that it organized a protest of sorts against the events, as describes as follows in this excerpt: —

"Only the Society of St. Pius X organized a ceremony of reparation and information for the faithful in an open and official way. See the press communiqué. With the help of the MJCF (Catholic Youth Movement of France) and the priory of Madrid, it was possible to gather a sizable group of motivated faithful in Fatima. Everyone distributed more than 12,000 tracts all over Fatima informing the faithful of the gravity of the blasphemy committed by the organization of this assembly."

But what is so strange about all of this is that the events at Fátima have apparently gone virtually unreported anywhere else, except for just these few sources. Even though some rather important people from the Vatican were involved—such as Msgr. Michael Louis Fitzgerald—the whole thing was almost as if it were done in a corner without anyone looking.

So far as I can tell, Front Page Online (www.the-news.net) seems to be the only source of the news about this "multi-faith congress to be held in Fátima," and so far I cannot find any other independent verification of the story. Even though the WCRP—the World Conference of Religions for Peace—is mentioned in one of the articles, the WCRP web site at www.wcrp.org doesn't mention any sort of involvement with anything happening in Portugal recently. So I have e-mailed WCRP to ask about it. I wonder if I will get a response.

I am beginning to think that the story just might possibly be bogus. But I'm not at all certain. But it's odd that no matter how much I Googleâ„¢ on it I can't seem to find any other independent information about it from a primary source.

Front Page Online is run by The News, which bills itself as "Portugal's largest circulation English language newspaper. Established for over 20 years, it is the only Portuguese newspaper on the net that covers all the major news about Portugal in the English language." But if it's a legitimate newspaper, how could a bogus story get planted?

Front Page Online (www.the-news.net) is the Portuguese web site that had the original articles, one entitled "Traditional Catholics attack Fátima interfaith congress," which is dated September 20, 2003; and the other entitled "Fátima to become interfaith shrine", which is dated, November 1, 2003. I suspect that the web masters there have intentionally made it so it's not possible to directly link to the actual news stories from the outside. Some newspapers do that so as to jealously protect their advertising revenues — it prevents anyone from reading their news stories without first seeing their ads. However, if one does go to their search page and uses the word Fatima as the key word, then it's possible to find the actual articles. So far it appears that Front Page Online is the original source of the news story, but so far I cannot find some independent source for information about this "interfaith congress" which supposedly took place.

Now shifting our attention from Italy over to the British isles, it seems that Peter Hitchens doesn't think it too far fetched that someday Britain will be muslim. Now is this a trend? First, it was the article in La Civiltà Cattolica. Then it was Cardinal Tucci saying some rather mordant things publicly. I wonder. Are Europeans really beginning to ask themselves if they want to live under a caliphate? Well, now that Europe is post-xtian and post-modern, why is it such a surprise to some of them that something is coming in to fill the vacuum?

It was today in 1975 that 29 men went down in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Let us pause a moment to remember them.

The article in La Civiltà Cattolica magazine, October 18th, No.3680, by Giuseppe De Rosa seems to be getting some traction. Now, it seems that columnist Diana West over at www.townhall.com is wondering out loud "Has the Vatican changed its mind about Islam?" Even the Duchess of Blogs, Amy Welborn, has also noticed Diana West's column. Okay, let's give this more time and watch what happens if the story ever percolates up to the big time and gets on the radar of the Alphabet News Media. And just how often do Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather read obscure Jesuit magazines written in Italian? If the story ever reaches them, it will be by a very circuitous route. But once it gets there will it be, as the saying goes, like the ordure hitting the rotating blades? Or will the story fizzle out? We will see.

I guess this fits me. Some folks might consider me irascible, but really I'm not — but I am starting to look plenty like him. That is why my wife is always reminding me to trim my beard.


Saint Jerome is praying for you! To learn more
about Saint Jerome, the irascible saint, go HERE.

Which saint would you be?

brought to you by Quizilla.

It seems difficult to track down the original stories about the Fatima brouhaha, mainly because the Portuguese the-news.net web server never has enough cgi resources allocated at its web site to serve up the stories. Apparently, they haven't paid their hosting bills, or are pretty cheap on the bandwidth. But so far this is what I've pieced together from other places making references to the story. There seems to be two news stories. One story is apparently from an article in The Portugal News, entitled "Fatima to Become an Interfaith Shrine"

Supposedly here is an excerpt from that article: —

"Delegates attending the Vatican and United Nations (UN) inspired annual interfaith congress 'The Future of God', held during October in Fatima, heard how the Shrine is to be developed into a centre where all the religions of the world will gather to pay homage to their various gods. The Congress was held in the Paul VI Pastoral Centre and presided over by the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon José de Cruz"

Then there is reportedly a second news article, entitled "Traditional Catholics Attack Fatima Interfaith Congress" which appeared at the-news.net. Here is what is supposed to be an excerpt from that article: —

"A spokesman for the Shrine authorities in Fatima told The Portugal News that many religions will be represented at the congress, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Anglicanism and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Under the auspices of the World Conference on Religion and Peace (WCRP) speakers will address the congress on the theme 'The Future of God'. It will be very similar to the interfaith meeting convened by Pope John Paul II in Assisi in 1986, where leaders of the world’s religions, including the Dalai Lama, met to pray together and discuss the development of a 'One World Religion'.

These interfaith meetings are now held annually and are directed by individuals with strong links to the United Nations (UN). Among them are the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev and Sir Sigmund Sternberg, director of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ). Sir Sigmund has close ties with the Vatican and played a major role in persuading John Paul II to remove a Catholic Carmelite convent from the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

According to an 800 page Italian study of the One World Religion movement, entitled La Faccia Occulta della Storia, the history of the WCRP can be traced back to 1993 when Sir Sigmund chaired a Chicago meeting, at which world religious leaders agreed to set up a 'Parliament of Religions' (PR). The idea was to form an international authority dedicated to unifying the world’s religions that would constitute a 'spiritual branch' of the UN. The ultimate aim of members of PR is to unify the major religions of the world under the umbrella of a UN globalisation programme. In 1994 at the invitation of John Paul II, the WCRP met in the Vatican, when 1,000 representatives of 15 different Pagan and Christian religions gathered to agree a plan on joint ecumenical initiatives."

Now supposedly, the Shrine's rector Monsignor Luciano Guerra said the following at the interfaith congress: —

"The future of Fatima, or the adoration of God and His mother at this holy Shrine, must pass through the creation of a shrine where different religions can mingle. The inter-religious dialogue in Portugal, and in the Catholic Church, is still in an embryonic phase, but the Shrine of Fatima is not indifferent to this fact and is already open to being a universalistic place of vocation."

But the exact source of the quote is unclear, but it might also have been from Portuguese the-news.com.

Furthermore, someone named Father Jacques Dupuis supposedly said at the congress the following: —

"The religion of the future will be a general converging of religions in a universal Christ that will satisfy all… The other religious traditions in the world are part of God’s plan for humanity and the Holy Spirit is operating and present in Buddhist, Hindu and other sacred writings of Christian and non-Christian faiths as well… The universality of God’s kingdom permits this, and this is nothing more than a diversified form of sharing in the same mystery of salvation. In the end it is hoped that the Christian will become a better Christian and each Hindu a better Hindu."

Again the exact source of this quote is unclear. So far this is about as close as I can get to the original news stories coming out of Portugal. And undoubtedly I have violated all sorts of copyright laws posting this stuff here.

Euodia is pretty upset about what's happening at Fatima in Portugal. The link to the original news story that appeared at www.the-news.net only works sporadically, so I will have to link to a secondary source at catholiccitizens.org. She is completely dismayed by this and thinks that perhaps it is a signal the End Times are upon us.

A certain person, who I will refer to as Giuseppe, had a word of caution for Euodia, in her comment box, about these upcoming events at Fatima:

Giuseppe:
"Euodia, while I share your concerns about the dilution of the Gospel, keep one thing in mind: For this universal religion to really gain momentum, it would have to persecute and eliminate the devout in all the religions it plans to subsume — and, frankly, I don't see that happening.

Why? Because such a universal religion is the product of utopian academics and elites, not of the common people. And it's the common people who are the most devout among various religions — and who aren't that utopian in their thinking.

The amount of police power needed to coerce everyone into this religion would be quite substantial, to the point where it really couldn't be sustained financially. It could only be done through 'one-world government' — and humanity's closest attempts to establish such a government, the League of Nations and the UN, were (and are) miserable failures.

None of this means I support or countenance what's going on in Fatima. However, we need to keep our perspective. Whatever event presages the Second Coming, I don't think this is it.

Keep something else in mind, Euodia: The people who advocate a universal religion are the least likely to use force to convert people, since they proudly view themselves as men and women of 'peace.' (Islam, by contrast, has no problem forcing conversions by the sword).

Just like individual nations will reassert their sovereignty when confronted by utopian collective demands (cr, the League of Nations in the way it dealt with the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in the 1930s), so will individual religions."

Since Giuseppe is perhaps the only person who bothers to read my blog, I will here offer my feeble apologies for quoting him, but I suspect that he won't mind that much. I also substituted in "Euodia" for her real name.

In any case, I took notice of this affair because I think it offers an interesting view into the whirlpool of confusion the upper echelons of the Catholic Church have become. On one one hand we have the article in La Civiltà Cattolica reminding people that the bloody red thread of militaristic Jihadism was woven into Islam from its very beginning — which is nothing new, but rather an easily discernable historical fact available to anyone who bothers to look. Then we have Cardinal Roberto Tucci expressing out loud, in forums like Vatican Radio, some unamicable thoughts about the muslims in Italy enforcing a sort of dictatorship of the minority. Consequently, some people were surprised at all this, because hitherto Vatican policy seemingly had been one of Koran-kissing, bend-over appeasement for the various thugocracies in the Middle East, appeasement which was combined with continually back-handing the Middle East's only democratic state, Israel.

But on the other hand, we have the hot tub ecumenicalism of Assisi and the Birmingham Summit, and now it appears that even Mary herself is about to be suborned, by the "utopian academics and elites", into becoming a sort of One World New Age Demi-Goddess, who will provide a focal point of good vibrations for everyone.

I agree with Giuseppe that it is effete academics — whose heads float like balloons on the winds of their own conceits — who love this barmy vision of World Solidarity Through Universal Niceness. Ordinary people such as myself find it pretty nonsensical and repugnant. I really don't want to hob-nob with the monkey god worshippers from India, or with the blood-thirsty Jihadis from Arafatstan, because, quite frankly, I think they are fundamentally screwed-up in their thinking. "What agreement is there between the Temple of God and idols?" the apostle Paul once asked. Of course the answer he was expecting to his rhetorical question was "there is none." And so I won't apologize for thinking the same way, because I'd rather be on Paul's side. The elites, however, really don't care about what Paul thought — they've already "deconstructed" Paul, tossing out the pieces they don't like and rearranging the rest into something they do.

Furthermore, I also agree with Giuseppe that the elites promoting this gibble-gabble really don't have any power, aqua et igni interdictus, to force their new Rainbow Goddess on everyone. And for that small blessing I am most thankful. But I do disagree a little with Giuseppe on one point: Even though the elites "view themselves as men an women of peace", I think that if they ever had the power they wouldn't hesitate to use it to "break a few eggs to make an omelette." Scratch a utopian and you'll always find a Stalinist underneath, I always say, and I think that history has provided enough testimony now to back me up on this. How they must eagerly wish the United Nations had some power! It would make their lives so much easier.

Which is incidentally one reason, I suppose, why President Bush is so thoroughly despised by the academics and elites, especially in Europe and the Vatican: he refuses to surrender to the United Nations, and he refuses to give it any veto over what the United States does. "How arrogant of him! What a cowboy!" They say. Thank Heavens! I say, because it means that the United Nations, for a long time to come, will continue to remain exactly what it is — a miserable failure. And therefore, the elites will never have any police powers to force me to worship in their Rainbow Temple of Universal Feel-Goodism. Vade retro me, Satana!

But why are they promoting this strange love-fest at Fatima? That's a good question. I'm not completely sure. But, if Saint Paul has already been deconstructed, as well as the other apostles, then why not Mary? The elites, even if they can't have a One World Religion for everyone, at least want to create one for themselves. And many of them happen to be high up ecclesial mucky-mucks in the Catholic Church, and therefore for them Catholicism happens to be the raw material closest at hand from which to fashion a new religion after their own image. What better place is there to start than with Mary? I will hazard here a possible theory. It is well known that JPII sees himself as having a very close connection to Fatima, even so far as to view himself as the fulfillment of the 3rd Secret of Fatima. I suspect therefore that what is happening at Fatima has his full approval and backing — it expresses exactly his outlook and thinking. I find it hard to believe otherwise.

Here is Bush's speech, about bringing democracy to the Middle East. However, I guess the "Holy Roman Emperor" thinks the speech is is just dripping with American hubris. Yeah, right. How dare we be so arrogant as to try to plant such seeds in such barren soil, and how could we expect any root out of such dry ground? I do hope some day His Imperial Exaltedness will have the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the Iraqis who spent time in Saddam's torture chambers. Ask them about American prideful over-reaching. See what they think about it.

Here is the Vatican's official biographical note on Cardinal Roberto Tucci.

It so happens that Cardinal Tucci turned up in a Zenit.org story entitled "Cardinal Tucci Warns Against 'Dictatorship of Minorities' In Wake of Judge's Decision to Bar Crucifix From School"Zenit.org doesn't allow linking to their stories and is very fussy about people reprinting them.

So I think I have another possible theory as to what is going on: There are some curialists who are honestly worried about the Islamic direction where Europe is heading, especially as muslims get to be an ever increasingly larger portion of the population. Until recently these curialists have kept their worries to themselves, but as the current PP grows more and more infirm and unable to keep tab on things, some of these curialists have grown a little more bolder about speaking on the issue. But my guess is they are still a minority but are being allowed to vent some steam about the matter.
(November 2, 2003; code ZE03110210). Unfortunately,

Now this is getting curious. Over at www.eubusiness.com, it was reported that Cardinal Roberto Tucci told Radio Vatican that "Today in all the Islamic world, in their media, the schools, there is an education of anti-Semitism... the worst anti-Semitism that you can imagine after that of the Nazis, or even equivalent to that of the Nazis"

It's amazing it's taken this long for the Vatican to finally notice this sort of thing. First it was the article in La Civiltà Cattolica, and now this. Are we seeing a trend? I don't know but it bears watching.

I've decided to discontinue my story about Euodia, as I've carried it as far as it will go. I later had a fairly serious disagreement with her. But I do not wish to rehash it because I do not want to run the risk of casting her in an excessively bad light. So I think I will switch gears and move on to other matters.

Several Catholic bloggers, as well as Charles Johnson over at his famous Little Green Footballs, have picked up on the story about what seemed like a turn-around in Vatican attitudes towards Islam. Everyone's attention centered on the article in La Civiltà Cattolica magazine, October 18th, No.3680, the article entitled "Christians in Islamic Countries" and written by Giuseppe De Rosa. The Italian newsletter www.chiesa carried an extract of the article tranlated into English, along with a brief introduction by someone named Sandro Magister.

In the words of Sandro Magister, "The central thesis of the article is that 'in all of its history, Islam has shown a warlike and conquering face'; that 'for almost a thousand years, Europe lived under its constant threat'; and that what remains of the Christian population in Islamic countries is still subjected to 'perpetual discrimination,' with episodes of bloody persecution."

Now Sandro also states that La Civiltà Cattolica is edited by a group of Jesuits in Rome and is reviewed by the Vatican Secretary of State before publication, and so "the magazine reflects his thought faithfully." This is very interesting, and it made me stand up and pay attention, especially as I have been in the past extremely critical of the pro-Islamic and anti-US stance that the Vatican always seems to take.

Sandro timidly seemed to hint that the article's release was somehow connected with Archbishop Michael Louis Fitzgerald not being elevated to cardinal because of his "excessively placid approach to Islam". But this seems to me more like speculation on Sandro's part. No evidence was given to back up this suggestion, and what happened simply could have been a coincidence.

The article itself, or at least the English extract in www.chiesa, doesn't really say anything surprising or new about Islam. It simply recounts stuff that is very easily known, provided one is willing to look. Charles Johnson and Robert Spenser's Jihad Watch, for example, do a thorough job of delving into all the nitty-gritty, bloody-gory details of such matters.

But why did article appear? Well, the magazine is edited by Jesuits, and Jesuits can sometimes be, well, jesuitical. Has the Vatican's Middle East policy actually changed? Well, first of all, one article by itself does not establish a trend. And, absent any other hard evidence, I remain unconvinced that there actually has been some sort of soul-searching turn-around. I certainly don't buy the theory about the recent matter concerning crucifixes in Italy sparking some sort of panicked realization in the Vatican that Europe is well down the road to becoming Muslim. But I am going to suggest that there may be a less obvious and more devious reason at work here, though it is a little difficult at this point to imagine exactly what it would be, and my thoughts about the matter are still rather nebulous.

One thought which occured to me is that publishing such an article might be a subtle means of throwing more gasoline on the fire. Given that much of the Islamic world is a boiling, seething caldron of enmity, hatred, and resentment, to bring up now the issue of past Islamic aggressions against European Xtiandom, and present injustices against Xtian minorities living in Muslim countries, will likely serve to aggravate the already present enmity to a new level of white hot intensity. So far the matter is not making much of a splash other than in the Blogific Ocean, as it were. But what happens once this issue percolates into the mainstream Big Media? And then to the media in the Middle East? My guess is that it make it much easier for the surviving Baathist thugs to argue that the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of Saddam's tyranny was really just another "Crusader invasion". And it will make it easier for the various terrorist organizations and their fellow travelers, who operate in places like Syria and Iran and Saudi Arabia, to recruit Islamist suicide-bombers to enter Iraq and drive the car bombs which are killing some of our soldiers, not to mention Iraqis and humanitarian aid workers. Therefore, to put it bluntly, one possibility is that the article was an underhanded attempt to make things even more difficult for the United States in Iraq, so difficult that the American public will eventually go into a defeatist funk, and the whole American endeavor in Iraq will end up failing, thus diminishing the US role in the world while somehow elevating the EU's.

It's hard to tell at this time whether this theory holds any water. Maybe it doesn't. Subsequent events will certainly prove or disprove it. The one serious problem I see in this theory is that it seems unlikely the normally cautious Vatican would be willing to run the risk of "blowback", by this I mean the risk that Muslim resentments might actually begin to focus on the Vatican itself, thus undoing years of diplomatic efforts to win better treatment for various Xtian minorities. But if this were the case, it remains puzzling why was the article was ever published at all. Nevertheless, this is something that I am going to watch.