Category: Fleming

1

The Wretched of the Earth

For many years whitebread Americans have struggled to find a place at the American table. Such outcasts of society do not even have a name they can call themselves without setting off a storm of reprisals. Euro-American? Not hardly. Whites? The very word might get you firebombed.

19

The Latin of the Latin Mass IV

Latin is not a magic bullet that will kill the demons destroying Christendom.  But it is a fact that so long as the literate classes of Europe and North America were brought up learning Latin, writers knew how to write clearly and effectively, and even ordinary people who had studied 4 years of Latin were more open to logical argument, more interested in truth than educated people are today

15

The Latin of the Latin Mass, III: Clarity, Correctness, and Traditions

Then it should be obvious to all that clarity, one of the rhetoricians’ requirements for good prose, is particularly important in translations of Scriptures and liturgies.  Another primary requirement, correctness, is related to clarity, because languages with prescriptive rules are less ambiguous than languages where “I say potayto, you say potahto,” and where a majority of speakers do not know the difference between relative clauses introduced by which and those introduced by that.

11

The Latin of the Latin Mass, II: The Problem With English

When the Novus Ordo was imposed by the Vatican hierarchy, the biggest losers were probably the English-speakers.  As everyone knows, the official version of the NO Mass is in Latin, and the translation into English was not only poorly and ineffectively written but it was filled with errors, some of which, I suppose (to give the plotters the benefit of the doubt) was simply the result of their own poor English.

18

The Latin of the Mass, I

Latin has been the language of the Western Church for roughly 1500 years, but it has also been the language of western Christendom, by which I mean the Christian civilization that incorporated the best of the Greek and Latin pagan traditions, Christianized them, and created that great glory we call the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, but which we should call the Christian Age, the age of Dante and St. Thomas.

2

Islamophilia, the American Dream

Many Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, have been astonished by the upsurge of support for Islam in general and Hamas in particular among leftists and members of the LGBT& “community.”  “Don’t they know that Islam subjugates women, imposes severe penalties for all deviant behavior, and  is intolerant of sexual diversity?