Bravest Thing (He Ever Did)

  Special Announcement: Yes, the rumours are true. I have been working on a novel, and intend to release it in the spring of 2022! It is a fiction work for the 10-14 age group. The basic plot concerns a day when the internet mysteriously dies, and a boy (and society) must learn how to live again. The topic is close to my heart, given what I’ve seen as a teacher the past 10 years. Stay-tuned in the new year for further details (and to even be a part of my book launch team).

  I just did a super quick browsing of sport headlines for Wed. December 15th. The pro sporting leagues have been pushing the COVID vaccine quite heavily. How's it going for them? Majority of Flames roster now in COVID protocol Predators coach Hynes, 6 players in COVID protocol Bergeron among 16 NHLers to enter protocol Wednesday Sacramento Kings interim coach Alvin Gentry tests positive for COVID-19 Latest updates on the NHL and COVID-19: Postponements, protocols, the Olympics and more Burnley vs Watford: Premier League fixture postponed after visitors hit by Covid outbreak Barcelona's Sergio Aguero announces retirement from football due to heart condition Rams enter NFL's intensive protocols amid COVID-19 outbreak Browns' Baker Mayfield, Kevin Stefanski test positive amid outbreak, 7 NFL teams in enhanced COVID protocol s Believe me, I could've gone on and on... Cover photo from CNN (I know, I know...)

  How many times have you heard "important" clergy and laity in the Church say things like...      The New Evangelization!      We need to accompany people...      How can we stop accompanying people right out of the Church?      How can we get more vocations to the priesthood?      We need to make the Church more relevant...      How come the youth aren't interested? We've made things so easy for them. Do they not realize we have GUITARS , for crying out loud!... We all know that these "important" clergy and laity don't know what the heck they're talking about, nor how to actually fix this mess. But there is good news.  Ahem. The Church does know how to fix this mess. Really, She does.  Take the vocations problem. What are we supposed to do about it? Maybe we could start with Ember Days. As I write this, Advent Ember Days begins (Wed.), and also goes on Friday and Saturday.  What do you do? You fast and pray, particularly for those to be ordained.

  Missed what's going on with non-liberal Catholics these days? Let me fill you in. Mike from RTF and Michael Voris had a fallout. It has to do with the fundraising of a private investigator in the accused Fr. Jackson ordeal. However, Voris is still friendly with Timothy Gordon, thanks in large part to Timothy's brother working for Church Militant.  Church Militant/Voris is also still on good terms with Patrick Coffin. But Coffin reiterated last week that he's most definitely anti-Taylor Marshall. Marshall had tried to stay close to Voris, but things went sour after the SSPX thing blew up. Marshall, known for his public Easter Sunday fallout with Timothy Gordon, was also getting it from Mike from RTF a while back. I'm not sure how that's going. However, Mike from RTF is trying to break into the 1P5 crowd of late. Meanwhile, the former 1P5 chief, Steve Skojec, has taken a break from it all, after having had it out with almost everyone else, save maybe Timothy Gordon.

Many of the churches in Saskatchewan are lacking in aesthetic beauty and theological precision.  Ok, I will cut the vague chitchat.  Many are outright ugly.  However, there is a priest in Saskatoon (SK) who is doing something about it. His church was one of the worst. Weirdly shaped. Connected to a gym. Jesus hidden away in some closet. It had that Susan's touch, if you know what I mean. Yet this priest has been working towards a major overhaul of his church. Just yesterday he posted these on Facebook: Yay! It's not a magnificent high altar, but it still is very wonderful to see. However... Today on Facebook I saw another post, this time from Peter Kwasniewski. He was letting readers know that in the Philippines they are currently devouring their own churches. Behold the destruction of a high altar: A few people commented that Blessed James Alberione celebrated Mass at this high altar.  Even the secular world recognizes historical sites and artifacts. But we in the Church are a

  Dr. Peter Kwasniewski posted a letter written by a parish priest recently. You'll find it interesting: When the Church allows itself to be the puppet of the State, good people suffer. More to the point, good people start to go crazy. I worry for this poor priest. He is stuck in an abusive relationship.

  I am sharing this because I know many readers are faced with pressing decisions requiring great discernment. I know my wife and I are at the moment. I am sharing an interview by Bonnie Landry with John Paul Meenan. Meenan is a professor at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Ontario (he used to teach me, way back in the day!). He goes through the steps of discerning major decisions in life (and lesser ones too), and the role reason, faith, and prayer play in it all. I highly recommend this interview for all people.  I found it very helpful. Click HERE . Note: The interview is also available on iTunes. Just search: Make Joy Normal.

  Times are tough. I know. Blah blah blah. But they are, and they wear us all down. The expression on everyone's face is a mix of stress, exhaustion, anger, and worry. How I long for simpler, happier times! Like 2019, or something. My wife asked me yesterday, "Do we know anyone who is full of happiness? Where you could go visit them and they pump you up?" This is not a shot at my friends or colleagues. It's not like visiting people is miserable. Far from it. However, we're all struggling, and a true non-superficial visit inevitably reveals real-life hardships.  But my wife continued, "Jude! He's always happy!" Jude is our two-year-old son. As only a two-year-old can, he is a spark of energy, joy, smiles, and craziness. He runs to me in the morning with a big smile. He runs to me when I come home from work and shouts my name. He runs to me when he doesn't want to go to bed at night. He is a non-stop bundle of laughs. Everyday, and I mean everyday,

  Every Friday at OnePeterFive there is an article by Fr. Z. The article goes through the Mass prayers/readings for the upcoming traditional Mass. I'm finding these articles to be very important for me personally. They have become an anchor for my prayer week. Just a snippet. This past week Fr. Z. brought up a quote by St. Bernard of Clairvaux. I loved it. Here it is: "St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153) remarks that God draws us to Heaven, as if against our will, by means of trials ( Sermones de diversis  99). He describes four different sorts of people who get into Heaven: “ alii violenter rapiunt, alii mercantur, alii furuntur, alii ad illud compelluntur …  some seize it by violence, some buy it, some steal it, and others are forced to it.” What does the  Doctor Mellifluus  mean by these negative analogies? Some, Bernard says, are like violent soldiers who sacrifice everything, live austerely with many mortifications to lay siege to Heaven and thereby win entrance. Others buy

  Take a step back and enjoy this little write up by the Jasper National Park team: "It is caribou rut season! During this time, the bigger the antlers, the better! Antler size allows males to easily size each other up. A smaller male will rarely challenge another bull who is larger, but drama is bound to brew when two males of similar size meet up. When nobody backs down, they will battle it out to see who is strongest. These fights can be intense and incredible to watch. Earning the title of 'dominant bull' is not an easy task. During the rut, a dominant bull spends a LOT of time and energy chasing away younger competitors – these big guys barely have any time to eat or rest. Only the strongest and most determined males can withstand such a challenging task. The ones that succeed have an opportunity to become fathers to the next generation of caribou calves. Something worth fighting for? " There is something raw, terrifying, and simply splendid about nature. I find

  Hello? Helloooooooo? Anyone there? So it appears that Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp are down. People tell me Twitter has been spotty as well. I'm not sure how trustworthy this article is, but it suggests the outage could be very serious: "Even Facebook’s internal tools and communications platforms are out. 'No one can do any work,'  New York Times  tech reporter Ryan Mac wrote in  a tweet . 'Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.' Internet sleuths quickly figured out it was an issue with Facebook’s DNS server, the infrastructure responsible for routing every user to Facebook’s location. Journalist Brian Krebs confirmed that 'the DNS records that tell systems how to find  Facebook.com  or  Instagram.com  got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables,' in  a tweet . 'Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?

  Let me recollect the steps from the past 19 months... Two weeks to flatten the curve. Lockdowns work. Masks work. Vaccines work. Segregation works. All of the above works Where I live, we are at the segregation stage, heading towards an  all of the above  scenario.  For now, the focus is to separate jabbed from unjabbed. The unjabbed get no rights, privileges, and, in many cases, jobs. The jabbed get to go to football games, buy alcohol, and work. They will also, by extension, have to pay for all the upcoming EI claims from the unjabbed. Of course this will not actually stop the spread of COVID (as though it were something we could control by creating policies). So it will morph into an all of the above hybrid as we march past Thanksgiving and into winter. The real question is: what are the next steps? Boosters work... Vaccinating children works... Taking away church works... Taking away children works... Poverty works... Imprisonment works... All of the above works... I do not have

  We celebrated Michaelmas yesterday. Of course there was no actual St. Michael-Mass in our parts. Tradition is so nostalgic, you know.  Tradition, actually, is for the young. Despite the Mass circumstances, we did our best. Behold, the Satan-smashing:

  I'm too busy these days to post much. I just returned to school after a mandatory "self'-isolation" (you can guess as to why), and have a lot of catching up to do. However, I will make time for an epic rant from Mr. Tucker Carlson. He was on fire with this one.  Click HERE. Enjoy.

  A re Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question Edited by Dr. Peter Kwasniewski Arouca Press 274 Pages Are canonizations infallible? This is a loaded question. Your immediate answer will speak volumes about your life and experience as a Catholic. Being raised in the 1990s, it was evident that the Church was a mess. Vocations were dropping faster than the pull of gravity, orthodoxy was scorned, catechism classes were a disaster - unless you liked crafts, and the Mass was traumatic - think girls dancing in the sanctuary to Days of Elijah while old people wiggled their butts in movement to the a spirit. Hip-replacements were a frequent reality at our parish (oh those hippies). But through it all, there was a sentiment amongst the few faithful Catholics that the pope was against all of this, and that these liberals were simply being disobedient. We were the real Catholics, and this mess wouldn't last forever.  And so, we believed certain things. We believed that the

  "The most prominent cell line, called HEK 293, comes from an abortion performed in the 1970’s. It’s labeled 293 because that’s how many experimental attempts the researchers needed to get a working cell line. Therefore, though the abortion-to-experiment ratio is not precisely one-to-one, hundreds of abortions went into the project, even if they didn’t result in the working line.  HEK stands for human embryonic kidney. To harvest a viable embryonic kidney for this purpose, sufficiently healthy children old enough to have adequately-developed kidneys must be removed from the womb, alive, typically by cesarean section, and have their kidneys cut out. This must take place without anesthesia for the child, which would lessen the viability of the organs. Instead of being held, rocked, and comforted in the time intervening between their birth and their death, they have organs cut out of them alive." * * * The above passage comes from a  Crisis Magazine  article written back in Jan

There have been fewer blog postings lately from me. The start-up to school takes a wallop out of my time, as well as my ability to think properly. I will have something up at 1P5 probably next week. But even with that, 1P5 has a new editor, and it's clear that our writing styles are worlds apart. It remains to be seen if we can work through it or not. He is a great guy, however, and a stalwart Catholic, so that should help with any tension that may arise. But back to my main topic. Another schoolyear has begun. Year number three of the Covid-Era. Though it all seems to be melding into one long and disastrous clump of time. Last year's schoolyear took a heavy toll on myself and other teachers. The stress of regulations, protocol, anxious or angry parents, and frequent student meltdowns was something we'd never experienced before with such high intensity. It took an entire summer, filled with climbing many mountains , before I was able to shake off the year. In talking with

My town made the news two days ago. Apparently COVID cases are "through the roof" here. Health authorities want everyone in masks again. School start-up might be delayed. The media is saying many nasty things about the un-vaxxed. As one person commented as he entered a store the other day and noticed the fear escalating: "I see we're getting all covidy again." Can we just press Pause for a second? Let's look at some honest stats from the government website regarding cases in my area: - My entire North East area has a population of 41,560. - Since March 2020 there have been 27,001 COVID tests administered. - 1812 people have tested positive. This means 4% of the population in the past year-and-a-half have caught COVID here. - 13 people have died of (or with) COVID during this time. This is for all ages. It is for all the 96-year-old grandmas, 57-year-olds morbidly overweight, 62-year-olds with stage 4 cancer, 36-year-olds with asthma... it is for everyone.

"…and thus was ever on their lips the countryman’s perpetual lament, so reasonable to the ear, but which recurs unfailingly: ‘Had it only been an ordinary year!’” – Louis Hemon (from Maria Chapdelaine , p. 124) * * * Harvest has arrived early this year. The massive - and massively expensive - combines are working around-the-clock as farmers take to gathering their crops. Where did the summer go? Soon it will be another eight months of snow and lockdowns. The familiar smell of wheat and dust mixed with a deliciously cool freshness - the usual autumn treasure - seems stale this year. It is not an enjoyable crisp scent this harvest, but one simply composed of dust and heat. The harvest is a disaster. The wheat appears half its usual size. The summer drought, which was no doubt caused by our sins against the climate – at least if you ask a politician, or Pope Francis - has crushed the spirits of farmers. The heartfelt lament of the farmer is spoken once again: Had it only been