Waiting for Godot to Leave

A reader of Mark Shea's blog tells of a priest who was tortured to death via "the water cure". He links to an article in the New York Times from 1903, in which some great things stand out in a quote attributed to Judge Advocate General George B. Davis, who said, (107 years ago) ... " No modern State , which is a party to international law, can sanction either expressly or by a silence, which imports consent, a resort to torture with a view of obtaining confessions as an incident to its military operations. If it does, where is the line to be drawn? If the 'water cure' is ineffective, what shall be the next step? Shall the victim be suspended, head down, over the smoke of a smoldering fire; shall he be tightly bound and dropped from a distance of several feet? Shall he be beaten with rods? Shall his shins be rubbed with a broomstick until they bleed? For all these, and more, have been done during the Spanish domination in the Philippine Islands, a...

This morning I noticed three unauthorized charges had gone through our home banking account within the last twenty-four hours via our debit card, totaling just under $50. The payments were made to Skype, the internet telephone service. Now I knew I had signed up for Skype, but I signed up for the free service, not the paid service, and I never would have given them our debit card number even if I had agreed to pay them anything. In addition, we’ve never even used Skype. The program languishes on our upstairs computer. But when you visit Skype’s website, they make it impossible for you to cancel your account (especially when you haven’t paid), and they give you no opportunity to contact them directly. The company seems to be based out of Luxembourg, and they provide no phone number for customer service or for billing errors. A quick Google of “Skype billing fraud” turns up over 70,000 sites, and the top of the list is Skype’s own forum, where users have been complaining about what I...

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. This is hard for readers to grasp, for O’Connor’s stories are so shocking, violent, and disturbing that we wonder how they can be about grace. This is because we see grace as being a “nice thing”, like quietly saying grace before meals, like the “graceful” moves of a figure skater, like the “social graces”, which are about soothing and calming people and situations. We really believe the message of all the Scriptures is “Jesus was nice; you be nice, too.” But the Grace of God is a man clothed in rags with a wild gleam in his eye eating locusts in the desert and warning his people to flee from the wrath to come. The Grace of God is the zeal of Phineas, who slew the Israelite and his wife who were flaunting God’s commands. The Grace of God is St. Paul, blinded, knocked down, humiliated. When the hand of God reaches o...

This is part one of what will be posted in two parts on The St. Austin Review Ink Desk . The Beast Advances or The Attack on Reason by Kevin O'Brien Hilaire Belloc, in “The Great Heresies”, pointed to a disturbing feature of the Modern Attack on the Catholic Church: the attack upon Reason. Nowhere is this more clearly displayed than on the internet - yes, on Facebook in particular, but also everywhere on the internet. And though I have written about Facebook before and my on-again off-again love-hate relationship with her, I’m beginning to see that the enemy is not Facebook. The enemy is us! Let me try to categorize the problems I’ve noticed: 1. BEING FORCED TO EXPLAIN THE PUNCHLINE A friend of mine on Facebook can not post even innocuous quotations such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying,” without a barrage of comment box (combox) attacks nitpicking at all sorts of things the quote never intended to convey. In this case, comment...

On the St. Austin Review Ink Desk, Sophia Mason has written an post in which she both pans and praises Facebook. How I empathize with Sophia! As regular readers know, Facebook and I have had a tumultuous relationship. She and I have split a few times after ugly public shouting matches, she pushed me down the stairs once, I have accused her of infidelity, her algorithm had originally sized me up as a loser and drug abuser simply because I was an actor, and so forth. But we’ve settled into something rather permanent of late. Facebook and I are not exactly “married”, nor “single”, we are “in a relationship” and “it’s complicated”. So I do indeed empathize with Ms. Mason over her tendency to love / hate this thing called Facebook. But how much is Facebook as a mode of communication to blame for Facebook’s shortcomings? As the internet blogger Dr. Thursday pointed out to me once, “Objecting to the internet is like objecting to a road or a highway. The internet is simply a pathway to a ...

There is awash in the world today a kind of idealism that’s loosed from its moorings. I suspect this is because the cynicism against which the idealism reacts is so strong and entrenched that it’s provoking reactions that are unrealistic. A case in point is James O’Keefe, a young man who spoke at this year’s American Chesterton Society Conference. O’Keefe is best known as the video journalist who brought down ACORN and who exposed the racism inherent in Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda by means of undercover videos in which he posed as a pimp or a racist, and elicited responses that were shocking enough to cause a few tremors. He struck us at the Conference as a quixotic idealist carrying on against the windmills of corruption while under assault from the mainstream media, lawyers and other nasty bugbears. However, it was a bit disturbing when, in the Q & A session following his speech, O’Keefe was asked, “How do you justify your technique? You lie to people in your undercover ...

First, I was given the great privilege of recording the official audio version of the Holy Father's new book, Light of the World as published by Ignatius Press, which can be ordered on audio CD or downloaded here . And I said two weeks ago to Jim Morlino , my co-reader for the audio book, "The Pope's comments about condoms will be the comments the press will run with." It did not take much prophetic insight to predict that. The situation is simple: All the Holy Father is saying is that if a man who is steeped in sin to begin with and is having sex for reasons contrary to God's will and the Natural Law, then if this particular man begins to have a pang of conscience that says, "Perhaps getting physical pleasure is not what this is all about. Perhaps I should be concerned about my partner here. Maybe I should use a condom so as to protect my partner from the ravages of disease," this is clearly (as charity and common sense will tell you) a movement in...