Tea at Trianon

Catharism, Calvary Chapel, and Catholicism

2026-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

To begin, the terms Cathar and Albigensian are synonymous. Generally speaking, historians have understood the Cathars to be more or less what Tim referred to them as; “gnostic heretics”. [3] Similarly, in his Manual for Inquisitors Bernard Gui (d. A.D. 1331) referred to them as “Manichean heretics”, before giving a brief synopsis of their beliefs.[4] The heresy itself is often associated with the Albigensian Crusade. By the thirteenth century the targets of the maturing crusading movement had expanded to include heretics, pagans, and even political opponents of the papacy. The targets of this particular crusade were the heretics and their Catholic protectors.

The Cathars/Albigenses of the Languedoc region in the South of France ultimately drew the ire of the papacy. They had entrenched themselves within the nobility there, facilitated by the fact that it was largely independent of the Capetian monarch to the North. Initially, the Church’s response of preaching, and public debating seemed to make little headway in rolling back the heresy, and the conventional wisdom was that force was needed. After the papal legate to the region was assassinated,– apparently on the orders of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (a protector of heretics), Pope Innocent III issued the indulgence for what became known as the Albigensian Crusade (ca. A.D. 1209-1229).

Some omissions aside for brevity’s sake, this is more or less how the origins of the Albigensian Crusade is presented in standard survey works on the subject of the Crusades, such as the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2005), or Thomas Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades. Both authors are well known Crusade historians, and both are/were university professors. Both were recommended reading on a syllabus in a colloquium on the Crusades I took at a secular university. Both present Catharism as a non-Christian, dualistic religion.[5] Both happen to be Catholics.

Additionally, both scholars above have influenced the historiography of the Crusades, are peer reviewed, have reputations to uphold, and are top notch. Madden also was a contributor to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on the Albigensian Crusade (hardly a pro-Catholic source). Nevertheless, since the very notion that Catharism was a non-Christian dualistic religion has been called “a Catholic lie”, we will look elsewhere for a basic understanding of this medieval heresy.

“Catharism was the greatest heretical challenge faced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.[6] Thus reads the first line of Malcolm Barber’s work, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages. He notes that the common view is that it was transplanted from the East in the form of Bogomilism, though some like R. I. Moore believe that it was a home grown dualism.[7] That it was a form of dualism is a given throughout the first chapter on the topic of the origins/ pedigree of Catharism.[8]

Like Madden and Riley-Smith, Barber affirms that the Cathars [aka Albigenses] denied the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that they had a rite known as consolamentum. After receiving this rite, the mere “believer” became one of the initiated (perfecti), and it was often delayed until just before death.[9] Like his discussion on the pedigree of Catharism in the first chapter, he includes a robust discussion of Cathar beliefs and practices in the third chapter. The evidence discussed there contradicts any notion of the Cathars/Albigenses being akin to modern day Evangelicals, as Yardley’s position seems to imply.

Though I don’t suspect that Mark Pegg would endorse Baptist successionism, he is nevertheless a historian who might possibly be coopted by its proponents. One major argument in his book A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is that “a very distinct Christian culture…was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church”.[10] He called for a revision of Christian history, arguing that “The Albigensian Crusade…was not a martial pilgrimage against a discrete religion with an organized heretical ‘Church’”.[11]

A survey of three reviews published about Pegg’s book shows that they were overwhelmingly critical regarding this particular aspect of it. One reviewer said that it was against “academic consensus”, and that the evidence presented failed to convince with respect to the historical revision.[12] While too mentioning that the scholarship is stacked against Pegg, another reviewer was also critical of his “dismissal of so many primary sources that support a Cathar church because he constantly suspects orthodox intent”.[13] Of the three reviews, it was the one in the Catholic academic journal which was arguably most sympathetic on the topic of Catharism, but even there the reviewer acknowledges that Pegg is contradicting notable scholars on this topic.[14]

For Barber, Cathar sources take a primacy when reconstructing Catharism, but “even orthodox [i.e. Catholic] attacks on Cathar belief are important since they were particularly concerned to define it accurately in order to give weight to their refutations”.[15] He posits a “moderate dualism” extant in the West up until a Cathar Council at St Félix de Caraman (ca. 1167) attended by envoys from the Bogomil Church in Constantinople changed the religious landscape to one dominated by “absolute dualism”. The Charter of Niquinta which emanated from that Cathar gathering seems to be a main component of his argument.[16]

Ultimately, Barber says, it was this absolute dualism that really drew negative attention from the Catholic hierarchy.[17] Though he argues that there were already established Cathar bishops in places like Albi [hence “Albigensian”] in the South of France, after the Council at St Félix de Caraman there would be a network of sixteen dioceses stretching from Tuolouse to Constantinople.[18] It is generally said that the Inquisition was the tool that the Catholic Church (in concert with the secular authorities) utilized to ultimately vanquish the heresy. Barber posits that both the moderate and absolute varieties of it may have survived up until the end of the fourteenth century.[19]

Whatever the case may be, Staples was certainly correct when he rejected the notion that, as he paraphrased Yardley), “the Albigensians are some sort of link in true Christians”. As Barber indicates, almost since the inception of the Reformation, Protestant authors have been concerned with establishing some basis for historical continuity in response to the charges of novelty coming from their Catholic opponents. Evidently, the first to attempt to link Protestantism with Catharism in a direct line was Jean-Paul Perrin, who in his work Histoire de Vaudois (1618), erroneously conflated the Cathars with the Waldenses [as the title indicates].

This Protestant affinity for the Cathars would sour a little over a century later. All of this and more Barber observes in his historiography.[20] Still, there are those in modern times who try to link Protestantism and Catharism. The position argued by Pegg, and seemingly by others more recently, is very different from the apparent Baptist successionism (or something in that vein) argued by Yardley. Moreover, the academic/ historiographical argument against the traditional understanding would seem to beg the question of how exactly to define “Christian”, and who has the authority to determine that? (Read more.)

Sanctuary States Should NOT Be Rewarded

2026-10-08T02:00:00.000-04:00

From The Enterprise:

An Army sergeant from Dayton has been stationed in Germany for two years. She has not slept in Ohio during that time. On Census Day, the Census Bureau still credits her to Ohio, and in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), the Supreme Court said that was fine. Overseas federal employees are assigned to the state that was their usual home, not to the base where they happen to be sleeping. A German tourist standing outside the Ohio Statehouse that same morning is physically in Columbus. Nobody thinks Ohio has earned an extra sliver of a congressman on his account. Presence and belonging come apart. Every census since 1790 has had to pick which one it is counting.
Last month, the Commerce Department published a proposed rule, signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, rewriting the residence criteria. Proposed section 60.4 would count foreign citizens who also hold US citizenship or a green card, and it marks everyone else holding only foreign citizenship as “Not counted for apportionment.” The rule’s own phrase for the line it draws is “durable permission from the sovereign to settle within the United States.” Aliens whose status is less durable, and less definite in length, than lawful permanent residence fall on the excluded side of that line, along with people here in violation of federal law. Under the proposal, usual residence is the place a person has lawfully spent the most days, as shown by tax records. Comments close October 13, on docket USBC-2026-0628. This is a proposal, not a finished policy. The administration put it through notice and comment in the open, years before the count, rather than issuing a memo in the middle of a census, as Trump attempted in 2020. A 2026 comment file will be the record a court has if the 2030 count is challenged. (Read more.)

The Mathematics of Beauty, #1: Harmony, Monotony, and Cacophony

2026-10-08T00:00:00.000-04:00

From The Way of Beauty:

This is the first of six posts on the mathematics of beauty1: the traditional body of knowledge, running from the ancient Greeks through the Church Fathers and into the design of Western art and architecture, which held that beauty has a mathematical structure and that this structure can be studied, learned, and applied. It was a standard part of an artist’s and an architect’s formation for centuries. Today it is virtually unknown, and I think its recovery is essential if we are to build beautifully again.
As six posts devoted to a single subject is a lot to post on consecutive weeks, I will post them on alternate weeks.
In this first post, I want to establish the problem by looking at some buildings, and to say something about how this tradition relates to natural science, which is the other great tradition of describing the world by number. The posts that follow will set out where the tradition came from, what it consists of, how it is used in practice, why it was abandoned, and what its recovery would mean.
If you examine almost any building constructed since the Second World War, the chances are that it will conform to one of two simple guiding principles of architectural design, and in both cases, the results are often bad. These two principles are even spacing and random spacing. The first generates visual monotony; the second generates visual cacophony. I have chosen these terms deliberately to set them against what traditional architecture always sought to achieve instead: harmony. (Read more.)

The New Face of An Old Heresy

2026-10-07T02:00:00.000-04:00

This article sums up the point I make in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From Postliberal Order:

In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known to history as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France. Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it. But so bizarre and subversive of social order were its doctrines that political and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the region judged its suppression to be urgent. At first the preferred methods were preaching and public disputation, with the new Dominican order taking the lead. But these appeals to reason proved inadequate, and after a papal legate was murdered by a Cathar, a military solution seemed unavoidable. Thus was launched the Albigensian Crusade – a venture notorious for excess and whose participants did not all have pure motives, but which did succeed in destroying the toxic movement.
What was the content of Catharism? It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil. This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker. For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen. Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power. And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected. On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).
Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline. Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things. Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected. Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral. Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it. Infanticide was sometimes practiced. And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.
Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though. Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation. Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life. Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.
Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous. While the Cathars regarded themselves as the Children of Light, they judged those who approved of living as human beings have always lived – marrying and having children, practicing sexual restraint outside of that context, owning property, using animals for food, resorting to war and the death penalty when justice and order made it necessary – as the Children of Darkness. Since these things are just commonsense preconditions of the social order, it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression. (Read more.)

‘The Heartland Visa’: The Push for a New Visa Category to Repopulate American Towns With Foreign Workers

2026-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Natalie Winters:

The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank co-founded by Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker, spells out the transaction in its Heartland Visa proposal:
“In exchange for living in a Heartland Visa community, workers with sufficient earnings will gain permanent residency”
A struggling town supplies the address. Washington supplies the immigration pathway. Foreign workers receive the prospect of a green card, while the Americans already living there receive another promise of economic revival.
The ambition is national. EIG’s blueprint identifies more than 1,700 potentially eligible counties, home to 58 million people. It proposes a minimum of 100,000 visas annually.
These communities’ economic pain has become the sales pitch for changing who lives in them.
And the campaign is still being pushed in Washington.
EIG’s first-quarter 2026 lobbying disclosure lists Heartland Visas and the Heartland Visa Act of 2024. Its second-quarter filing, submitted July 20, names them again. Together, the filings report $360,000 in lobbying expenses across the organization’s policy agenda; they do not break out spending on this visa campaign.
The documents name John Lettieri and Catherine Lyons as lobbyists. This is an organized effort to turn a demographic proposal into federal policy. (Read more.)

Finding Sir Lancelot

2026-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Medievalists:

Today, being the world’s only Lancelot wall paintings preserved in situ, the Siedlęcin set ranks among the most outstandingly complete and well preserved in Europe. The story of Arthur’s greatest knight, his glittering career, adulterous love for Guinevere and subsequent downfall has been told in two registers and should be ”read” from the lower to the upper one, from left to right (as in case of many other examples of medieval cycles).

The lower register shows Sir Lancelot and his cousin, Sir Lionel, claiming the world shortly after they had been knighted. To prove their valour and knightly skills in hand-to-hand combat they set off for their first big adventure. The story goes with the tale of Lionel’s capture and Lancelot’s duel with the knight named Tarquin, whom Lancelot defeats and kills. Thanks to this victory sixty-four knights imprisoned in Tarquin’s castle (including Lionel and four other knights of the Round Table) obtain their freedom.

The upper register shows fair Guinevere with her ladies before the walls of Camelot. Lancelot accompanied by his entourage presents himself to her. The next scene depicts the wicked knight Meleagant as he carries the queen away. He is going to be ultimately slain by Lancelot. The latter hurries to his lady’s rescue, suffering – among many a hardship – a total humiliation of riding in a cart, a form of travelling reserved for criminals. He rescues the queen in the end, the sinful nature of their love being shown in a depiction where they hold their left hands – a clear symbol of their adulterous affair. (Read more.)

The Name of the Rosary

2026-10-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

While editing and rewriting sections of my novel about medieval France I researched the development of the rosary. I came across a fascinating blog called Paternosters which was a name given to prayer beads in the medieval period. Here is an article about the origins of the the word "rosary" which I found quite interesting. To quote:

To get back to beads, however, traces of the earlier meaning of bid/bede as "a prayer" still remain. For instance, a wealthy patron in the Middle Ages may have supported poor bedesmen, who had promised to pray for the patron, and may have provided a bedehouse for bedesmen or bedeswomen to live in. Likewise, “bidding one’s bedes” in the Middle Ages does not so much mean praying with a literal string of beads, as it means praying for one’s bedes, that is, the people or requests one is obliged to pray for.

The word “rosary” originally meant a garden devoted to the growing of roses (c1440, “This mone is eke rosaries to make, with setes [seats]”)....Probably both the rose-garden concept and the book title contributed to the idea of referring to a collection of written prayers and devotions as a (metaphorical) rosary, such as the 1526 Rosary of Our Savyour Jesu or the 1533 Mystik sweet Rosary of the faytheful soule.

From here it was a short step to applying the term “rosary” to the specific prayer practice we have been discussing, including its string of beads.

Other European languages also call the rosary by a name referring to roses. In German it is a rosenkranz, in French a rosaire, in Italian and Spanish a rosario, and in Hungarian it is a rózsafüzért (literally a “rose string”). However in Austria it is more commonly a betschnur (“prayer string”) and in France, often a chapelet. (Read more.)

Freedom & Justice Return to Latin America

2026-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

From The Enterprise:

Most Americans picture USAID as sacks of grain and boxes of malaria medicine. In Latin America that picture was badly incomplete. The agency’s inspector general reported that democracy, human rights, and governance made up its largest program category in the region, and the portfolio was candid about its purposes. It funded “political competition and consensus building,” civil society, independent media, the free flow of information, governance, human rights, and election-related work. Political competition is the contest for power itself. An agency that funds it inside another country has entered that country’s politics, whatever label it prints on the grant.
A political party resembles a business storefront. Voters see the sign, the candidates, the slogans. Behind the storefront runs a supply chain: the advocacy groups that draft policy, the institutes that produce studies, the journalists who decide which stories count as news, the monitors who certify an election as clean, the lawyers who bring the lawsuits, and the foreign validators who tell other capitals which side speaks for democracy. A party can survive a bad candidate. It struggles to survive losing its supply chain. USAID ran no storefronts in Latin America, but it financed a large share of the supply chain, and the goods on those shelves suited one kind of store far better than the other.
El Salvador shows how the arrangement worked in practice. When USAID concluded that Nayib Bukele’s government was backsliding, its inspector general recorded that the agency moved money away from four government institutions and toward civil-society groups working on transparency, anti-corruption, and human-rights monitoring. It paid for legal assistance and advocacy, for protecting activists and journalists, and for mechanisms that helped civic organizations and media push back against the government. Bukele did not deserve the pushback. Salvadoran voters had handed Bukele enormous majorities, and a US agency, having judged him objectionable, used American tax dollars to strengthen the people opposing him at home. Bukele saw it plainly. In a February 2025 post on 𝕏, he wrote that funds sold as democracy promotion were mostly “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.” (Read more.)

Beyond Love Songs: Troubadours and Cathars

2026-10-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Medievalists:

Although the troubadours’ poetry does not explicitly indicate a connection to Cathar beliefs, Aroux, Péladan, and Rahn postulated that the troubadours intentionally wrote in an ambiguous style called trobar clus (“closed style”) so that their affiliation to the Cathars would be disguised, lest they be persecuted for associating with a heretical sect. According to Aroux, the troubadours’ jongleurs travelled around France while singing their songs, and along their travels, revealed the lyrics’ secret messages to select listeners. While certainly interesting, these authors’ theories are highly speculative and suspect, and as stated by Karen Sullivan in her book Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature: "…in more recent years, critics have tended to dismiss the possibility of a link between Catharism and troubadour verse, to the point where two new surveys of medieval Occitan poetry do not even bother to refute this notion."

Despite the consensus among most scholars that the troubadours’ poetry does not indicate signs of Cathar influence, there is still contention among some who insist that certain troubadours harboured an affinity for the heretical sect, especially Peire Cardenal. Select verses from Cardenal’s works denounce and admonish the Catholic clergy – who he thought to be hypocritical – which has led some authors to believe that he was a Cathar sympathizer (since Cathars were very much opposed to the Catholic church). Cardenal’s disdain for the clergy is exemplified in his poem “Clergues se fan pastors.” The poem reads as follows: “Clergue se fan pastors, et son aucizedor, e par de gran sanctor, qui los vei revestir” which translates to “churchmen pass for shepherds, but they’re murderers. Dressed in their robes, they seem so saintly.” (Read more.)

The Angelic Salutation And The Black Death

2026-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00

The Annunciation ~ Frederic James Shields

From Aleteia:

This second part (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death”) is believed by many to have been added during the plague to ask for the Blessed Mother’s protection from the fatal disease. Venerable Fulton J. Sheen explains this origin in his book The World’s First Love.

Since it seizes upon the two decisive moments of life: “now” and “at the hour of our death,” it suggests the spontaneous outcry of people in a great calamity. The Black Death, which ravaged all Europe and wiped out one-third of its population, prompted the faithful to cry out to the Mother of Our Lord to protect them at a time when the present moment and death were almost one.
An expert in Marian devotion, Fr. Donald H. Calloway, confirms this conclusion in his book Champions of the Rosary and explains how, “After the Black Death, the second half of the Hail Mary began to appear in the breviaries of religious communities, especially those of the Mercedarians, Camaldolese, and Franciscans … the people of the 14th century greatly needed the ‘hope-filled’ dimension of the second half of the Hail Mary prayer.” (Read more.)

Foreign Policy and the Oil Clock

2026-10-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

From AND Magazine:

Gulf exports excluding Iran were back at the pre-war average in September, about 16.5 million barrels a day, Kpler tracking cited by Just the News. Iranian loadings have been near zero since the July blockade. Bessent said about 15 million barrels remain on the water, nearly all for China, and that Tehran runs out of oil to trade in about two weeks. That is his clock, not a confirmed cutoff. Just the News
Brent settled Friday at $102.25, down 6 cents. WTI finished at $91.11, down $1.76. For the week, Brent was up 0.11 percent, and WTI was down 1.6 percent. Saturday quotes were still about $102 for Brent and $91 for WTI, roughly 42 percent above the February baseline near $72. The Brent–WTI gap, about $11, is the Hormuz signature: waterborne crude is repriced, U.S. inland crude less so. Business Recorder, citing Reuters and Hormuz Monitor
The Friday dip was the diesel story, not a peace story. French President Macron chaired a G7 call. EU countries agreed to a French proposal to release part of their diesel stocks over about 20 days. It was not clear the G7 had agreed on volumes. A stock release can loosen diesel for a few weeks. It does not replace barrels that are not loading in Iran, and it does not reopen the strait. Capital Economics said another release could tip the market into a slight surplus only if the recent pickup in non-Iranian Gulf flows holds. Business Recorder (Read more.)

Elites Keep Saying It's Not True

2026-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

From David Strom at Hot Air:

Most religions have some version of an evangelical streak, and rightly so. If you believe that you are following the one true path, it is your duty (in most religions) to spread the word. There are exceptions, like Judaism, but the principle mostly holds.
What makes Islam particularly aggressive is that it is not just a religious tradition or set of beliefs; it is a totalitarian ideology that doesn't allow for a separation of politics and religion, and that is based on the belief that civil law and religious duty are the same thing, and that its mission is to spread Islam to the entire world through all necessary means. Islam has always spread through conquest and, ironically, colonialism. In many ways, it is the opposite of Judaism in that regard, despite the fact that Jews are accused of being the ultimate colonialists. Jews are almost uniquely particularist, with no impulse to spread the word and little interest in territorial expansion beyond their historical borders. (Read more.)

Queen Anna (Stuart Queens Trilogy Book 1)

2026-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

From Amazon:

A crown won in the eye of a storm. A queen who refuses to be broken...

Princess Anna of Denmark sails for Scotland to marry King James VI, but storms ravage her fleet, igniting a deadly obsession with witchcraft in her new home. Arriving in a strange and paranoid court, Anna finds her new husband’s bed is a treacherous place.

Surrounded by whispering courtiers and shifting alliances, Anna refuses to remain a passive pawn. When the court takes her children to raise them away from her, the young queen draws her line in the sand. From the windswept castles of Scotland to the glittering, dangerous English court, Anna is restored to her rightful place in history.

Once again, historical novelist Tony Riches proves that true events make the best stories, especially when based upon solid research, as well as loyalty to the original personalities of the actual characters. Anna of Denmark has been largely overlooked by novelists as dull and dutiful, a quiet presence in the background of the rollicking Jacobean court. Tony paints a vibrant portrait of a great Queen who left an indelible imprint on the art and culture of the era, in addition to mothering the Stuart dynasty. While not caving to anachronisms of the feminist interpretations of history, Tony's depiction of the Danish princess, who became the bride of the son of Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley, respects the framework in which Anna found herself as a very young girl. She had no concept of the type of man she had married nor of the demons which tormented him. Nevertheless, she was expected to provide heirs along with the veneer of an amicable family life, all while her husband chased handsome young men, growing more obsessed with each passing lover. Realizing, after much disappointment, that she had to cultivate a life for herself, Anna remodeled the palace she renamed "Denmark House" as a refuge of order and beauty.

As an author of Stuart-themed novels myself, I would recommend Tony's Queen Anna as an introduction to seventeenth-century England for those who wish to explore it in either novels or biographies. The seeds for the calamitous Wars of the Three Kingdoms are sown in the reign of James I who, on one hand, was a scripture scholar and theologian, deeply conscious of his duties as the Lord's Anointed. On the other hand he could be highly intemperate, whether in his love of drink, in his overzealous hunting of witches or in his passion for his own sex. Anna brought dignity, glamor, and continental sophistication to the court, be it in Scotland or in England, as well as bearing the first royal princes and princesses seen in England since the days of Henry VIII. She could not save either her family or her kingdoms from James, though, and the repercussions of his behavior upon their youngest son Charles. All this and much more is shown, not told, in the novel, as the reader is invited to draw their own conclusions from such a lively yet heartbreaking rendition of the past.

This painting by Paul van Somer has an interesting role in the novel

Queen Anna by Tony Riches is available HERE.

The Ancient Parable

2026-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

From James Howard Kunstler:

Translation: Chuck Schumer knows that the Democrats have already been thwarted from rigging the election, from flooding the polls with illegal immigrant voters, with dead voters, with voters who moved out of state but still got mail-in ballots sent to their old addresses, with voters registered as living in Walmart parking lots, and so on. Chuck Schumer knows that the Civil Rights Division of DOJ is sending hundreds of lawyers to observe the action in swing state polling places. ICE might even be on hand to see who turns up.
So, Chuck Schumer is pretending that the Republicans will try to do what the Democrats actually did in several previous elections (including the last midterm, 2022, viz., AZ, GA, NV), and would have liked to do in this midterm, but can’t. The Democrats will holler like crazy about it before the election to plant this idea in credulous minds. They will jump up and down going woo-woo-woo on Election Day itself to water the idea. And after the election they will blitz every critical precinct with lawsuits to prevent the vote from being certified, using select “activist” judges to issue TROs and writs to delay election results and de-legitimize the vote.
And if none of that avails — which it won’t — they’ll call out their ground troops, Antifa, BLM, Free Palestine, LGBTQ2S+, the furious transsexuals, the hysterical cat ladies, and suchlike to make a giant ruckus so as to provoke the president to invoke emergency powers to quell the mayhem. And then they’ll point at Mr. Trump shrieking, “See! Tyrant!” (Read more.)

The Need for ‘Sprezzatura’

2026-10-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

From The Habsburg Way:

At the turn of the 16th century, there were few places more esteemed than the Italian city of Urbino. Thanks to the inspired rule of the Montefeltro Dukes of Urbino, the city hosted one of the most illustrious courts in all of Europe, with a cultural output that rivalled Florence and Rome at their Renaissance heights. Castiglione had fond memories of his own time there, and indeed wrote Il Cortegiano as a debate taking place at the court of Urbino. The topic of the debate was simple: what makes the ideal courtier?
Initially, the courtiers ask whether noble birth is an essential prerequisite. While agreeing that it gives a powerful stage to a man, they also largely agree that it merely projects the reality of who that man is, enhancing his vices as much as his virtues. Very quickly, the courtiers observe that there is something far deeper at play than status alone:
“Besides his noble birth, then, I would have the Courtier… endowed by nature not only with talent and beauty of person and feature, but with a certain grace and (as we say) air that shall make him at first sight pleasing and agreeable to all who see him; and I would have this an ornament that should dispose and unite all his actions, and in his outward aspect give promise of whatever is worthy the society and favour of every great lord.”
Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, I.14
Grace is a word that appears again and again in the texts of Renaissance Italy. It was used to describe honorable conduct, and to describe the works of Raphael, arguably the greatest painter of the Renaissance, whose hometown also happened to be Urbino. One of the courtiers present, Cesare Gonzaga, underlines this apparent importance of Grace by agreeing that it is “universal seasoning, without which all other properties and good qualities are of little worth”. But what actually is it?
To answer the question, Castiglione coins a new word, Sprezzatura. There is no direct English translation of Sprezzatura, but Castiglione helpfully defines it for us:
“To practise in everything a certain nonchalancethat shall conceal design and show that what is done and said is done without effort and almost without thought”
Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier I.26
In other words, no matter the context it is applied to, a graceful man is one who is able to make the difficult appear natural. Appear, however, is the crucial word. It may well have taken arduous study and years of practice to reach this level of confidence, but the secret to charisma lies in downplaying the preparation. (Read more.)

The "Hail Mary" Over the Centuries

2026-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00

From English Historical Fiction Authors:

From Christianity’s earliest days, the Virgin Mary was an advocate for the faithful, an intercessor who would plead their case to God. Devotional images of her go back to the second century, and more Christians started to name their daughters Mary toward the end of the fourth century.

A novelist studying early medieval times can easily see her importance. Charlemagne dedicated a newly built basilica at Aachen to her. On a smaller scale, a scribe wrote, “The book was given to God and His Mother by Dido [of Laon]. Anyone who harms it will incur God’s wrath and offend His Mother.”

No surprise, then, that Christians wanted a prayer just for her. When I first wrote The Cross and the Dragon, I assumed the Ave Maria always had its current form. I just needed the Latin translation for my characters.

Imagine my surprise when my editor informed me that Ave Maria was a lot shorter in the eighth century. “Hail, Mary, full of grace,” or words to that effect go back to the sixth century, so I could have my characters praying “Ave Maria, gratia plena.”

But it apparently took a few more centuries for the prayer to get longer. Two Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from around 1030 include “benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui” (“blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb”). In the 12th century, churchmen accept the greeting to Mary as a form of devotion, as familiar as the Apostle’s Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.

And so the salutation persisted, accompanied by a gesture of homage such as genuflecting, kneeling, or bowing the head. Some saints said the Ave Maria 50 to 150 times a day. (Read more.)

Tariffs Work For America

2026-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

Today, President Trump announced a major expansion of the Korea Strategic Trade and Investment Deal, unlocking $200 billion in new Korean investments in the United States as part of the broader $350 billion partnership reached last year.
Tariffs served as the primary leverage that secured this deal. For those who still question how tariffs help Make America Great Again, this is a clear example.
In 2025, the Trump administration imposed or threatened reciprocal tariffs on South Korean goods at around 25 percent. To avoid or reduce those rates, South Korea committed $350 billion in U.S. investments—$150 billion for shipbuilding and $200 billion for strategic projects in energy—in exchange for lowering tariffs on most Korean goods to 15 percent.
This investment pledge was the explicit quid pro quo for tariff relief. Trump has directly linked the funding to the negotiations, noting that South Korea “paid to get tariffs reduced and part of that money is going to this project,” and that investments of this scale might not otherwise have been available. Throughout 2026, the threat of higher tariffs continued to ensure progress on delivering the commitments.
As a result, these commitments are now being converted into concrete, large-scale energy and infrastructure projects that will yield tens of thousands of American jobs, expand reliable power capacity, strengthen national energy security, and support the trillions of dollars already flowing into advanced manufacturing and semiconductors. (Read more.)

Education and the Moral Life

2026-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Mater et Magistra:

Practical Steps for Forming a Sound Conscience

Seek Wisdom, Not Just Knowledge – The study of theology, philosophy, and the lives of the saints provides a framework for understanding moral truth. Reading Scripture and the Catechism with a heart open to God’s love helps ground our moral reasoning in faith, not fear.
Cultivate a Relationship with God – Moral decisions should flow from love, not dread. Regular prayer, particularly the Rosary and mental prayer, fosters a deeper trust in God's mercy and guidance.
Practice the Virtue of Prudence – Not every decision is a moral crisis. Learning to distinguish between mortal and venial sin, and recognizing when a choice is simply a matter of prudential judgment, brings clarity and peace.
Confess Regularly, But Not Excessively – Frequent Confession is a gift, but for those struggling with scrupulosity, it can become a source of unnecessary distress. A regular confessor who understands this struggle can provide reassurance and help in forming a balanced conscience.
Trust in Divine Mercy – St. Thérèse of Lisieux reminds us that God’s mercy is greater than our weaknesses. Trusting in His love frees us from the crippling burden of perfectionism and allows us to live joyfully in His grace.
Avoid Unnecessary Doubt – If a person has made an honest effort to discern a moral decision and still experiences doubt, they should trust that God does not demand absolute certainty but a sincere heart. Seeking spiritual direction can also provide clarity.
Remember: God Calls Us to Peace – Christ repeatedly tells us, “Be not afraid.” A moral life lived in love brings peace, not endless anxiety. The more we grow in virtue, the more we can rest in the knowledge that God is guiding us.
(Read more.)

The Rosary in Art

2026-10-02T02:00:00.000-04:00

From the marvelous Paternosters blog, a series on how to recognize a rosary in old paintings. To quote:

I've been looking at some portraits of women with beads around the neck that I'm pretty sure are decorative necklaces and not rosaries. But then I ran across the painting below. It's called "The Magdalen Weeping," and was painted about 1525 in the Workshop of the "Master of the Magdalen Legend." It's now in the National Gallery, London....

A very good clue that something is a rosary is the presence of gauds (marker beads) at regular intervals on a single string of beads, with smaller beads between. The painter may or may not reproduce exactly how many beads are in each interval, but my sense is that the presence of larger, contrasting colored beads like this is probably intended as a signal that this element of the painting represents a rosary. So far, I have not seen anything that couldn't be a rosary that has this feature. (Read entire post.)

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Endorse Democrats

2026-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

From Tierney's Real News:

After the President of Iran told the United Nations last week that Iran was blameless and that Americans are the real terrorists, there were suddenly two terrorist plots against the West - one at a base in the UK and another on a plane from UAE to Israel that many world leaders said were both likely orchestrated by Iran.
Then, this week, Iran's Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) did something unusual: they wrote a long letter to American voters encouraging them to rise up against Trump and the Republicans and basically vote Democrat in mid-terms for regime change. I’m not kidding. Their open letter, running 25 pages or so, tells Americans to "wake up” and take control. It never names a party, but the target is clear. Now you know whose side the Democrat party of today is on and it’s not America’s!
The letter landed days after Secretary of State Rubio ordered Iran's UN delegation out of New York for overstaying their welcome. Whether these events are connected is something investigators have yet to establish but you and I both know the truth.
What the letter shows is that the Shia Twelver Doomsday cult and criminals running Iran are now desperate enough to speak directly to the American electorate and tell us to overthrow the Trump administration so the Democrats (Communists) can surrender to Iran. (Read more.)

St. Hildegard’s Encounter With Angels & Their Music

2026-10-02T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Catholic Exchange:

St. Hildegard of Bingen, a Doctor of the Church, was not just a Benedictine superior, mystic, diplomat, woman of letters, naturopath, and linguist but also a composer. She left us with seventy-seven liturgical chants, hymns, and sequences and a liturgical drama: The Order of the Virtues. Fr. Pierre Dumoulin wrote that these works make up one of the richest repertoires of medieval music. Yet they are not the fruit of a composition work, strictly speaking, but the transcription of celestial harmonies that the saint perceived through her visions.

Hildegard actually contemplated the heavenly myriads. “Some radiated like fire. Others were completely clear. Still others glittered like stars. It was a concert of voices that was like the sound of the sea.” She thought that the angel was man’s model. The angel reminded St. Hildegard that praise was her vocation: “Man, God’s creature, must praise Him because his soul is made to live in praise, like the angels.”

The Fall contributed to disturbing the original harmony whose memory lives in us and which we must rediscover: “The canticle of praise is rooted in the Church according to celestial harmony through the Holy Spirit.” St. Gregory said it before her: music is the most elevated of all human activities. Hildegard believed that “when man’s spirit is well directed, he hears the song of the angels.” “The soul is itself a symphony, and it harmonizes everything.” She wrote that “the cohort of the angels yearns for God. It recognizes Him throughout the symphony of its praises and celebrates its past and present eternal mysteries.” (Read more.)

Henrietta Maria’s Broken Dream

2026-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

From The Catholic Herald:

Throughout the 1630s, Queen Henrietta Maria’s mission to re-establish the Catholic faith in England looked increasingly successful. The decade saw numerous high-profile conversions, growing crowds around the new centres of legal Catholic worship in London, and a relaxing of penalties against Catholics.

But none of this activity went unnoticed by Puritan detractors. By the end of the decade, parliamentarian unrest increasingly targeted the queen’s influence on the king.

To help Charles I prepare for the possibility of war, Henrietta Maria sailed to the Continent to raise funds and gather an army. Her letters to Charles during this period confirm parliamentary suspicions: the queen was her husband’s most hardline counsellor. She repeatedly urged him to defend his Crown, his family and his people against the rebels, threatening that if he did not take stronger action she would retreat to a nunnery. Such strong terms were necessary. Charles’s military decisions during the first years of the 1640s were halting and uncertain, and he sometimes appeared ready to submit to his opponents’ demands.

In early 1643 Henrietta Maria returned to England, landing in the small port of Bridlington, midway between the parliamentary strongholds of Hull and Scarborough. She had with her an army of 1,000 men and 300 officers, 1,000 saddles, £80,000 in cash and suits of armour for 20,000 men. Royalist hopes surged with her arrival and a series of victories against the rebels followed. The queen herself came under fire shortly after her return. Waking in the night to the sound of shot circling the house where she slept, she ran outside and hid in a ditch until morning.

While she was dodging cannonballs in the north, her houses in London were being ransacked. One of the Capuchin friars attending Henrietta Maria reported that John Clotworthy MP entered the chapel at Somerset House, where he climbed on top of the altar table and looked at Rubens’s The Crucifixion in its gilt frame. “Calling for a halberd, he struck Christ’s face in contempt with such offensive words it would be shocking to repeat them. His second blow was at the Virgin’s face, with more hateful blasphemies, and then, thrusting the hook of his halbert under the feet of the Crucified Christ, he ripped the painting to pieces.”

Clotworthy and his men then smashed sculptures of the Virgin and Child, cut up the remaining paintings, set the books alight and took off with the vestments. The Capuchins were arrested and deported. All this was done because Parliament “was greatly incensed against [the queen] … without [whose] encouragement and aid the king would never have put himself in a position to resist”.

After a slow and perilous journey south to Oxford, the queen was reunited with Charles in 1643 and was soon pregnant with their ninth and final child. Shortly after the baby girl was born, the ailing and disconsolate queen returned to France to gather more money and soldiers. But by the middle of the decade, Cromwell’s New Model Army was frustrating Cavalier military endeavours and the royalists suffered a series of defeats.

When the king was finally captured his letters from the queen were seized and published widely. Here, finally, the rebels could claim proof of their suspicions that the queen had seduced the king “under the royal curtains … to advance the plots of the Catholics”. Under her influence, the king had begun to “pray unto the Lady Mary and be ruled by his little Queen Mary”, who had convinced him that to do so was not “idolatry, but the way to increase his Royal Off-spring”.

Too ill to return to England, Henrietta Maria instead worked for the royalist cause from France; but in 1649 Charles was executed. The queen never recovered from the loss. Aged 39, she retreated with her youngest child to the Carmelite convent of her youth. A number of sources attest that, were it not for her children, she would have remained in enclosed prayer for the rest of her life. (Read more.)

From the great Leanda de Lisle at Historia:

Puritans came to see the deep love of the royal couple as a threat. They disliked the ceremonial style of Protestantism that Charles preferred over their stripped-down Calvinism, and they blamed the influence of the Queen. Yet this was quite untrue; for Charles, the Protestant Church of England was “the best in the world”.

When Charles’s religious reforms triggered rebellion in Presbyterian Scotland, the Scots’ allies in England used Henrietta Maria’s Catholic faith as a means of attacking the King. She was trolled from the pulpits as a “Popish brat of France” and, as hatred against Catholics fanned to new heights, so mobs were sent to attack her house.

The following October, a Catholic rebellion broke out in Ireland. News of massacres of Protestant settlers were used by Charles’s enemies to recruit to their cause, and the finger of blame was pointed at the innocent Queen. In February 1642, on the eve of the English Civil War, Henrietta Maria left for Holland. This was not to save her own skin, however, but to act as Charles’s chief diplomat and party leader in Europe, as well as his arms buyer.

She returned to England in February 1643 with men, money and arms. After a dangerous landing in Yorkshire, she spent months raising royalist morale in the north, eating in sight of the soldiers and recruiting men.

The royalists had gained superiority in Yorkshire by late June, when Charles called for her to join him in his wartime capital at Oxford. Parliament sent cavalry to intercept the Queen and her men, but she escaped again and, still en route to meet her husband, the “generalissima” (as she called herself) captured Burton-on-Trent in a “bloody” and “desperate” battle. (Read more.)

My novels about Queen Henrietta Maria available HERE and HERE.

President Trump Announces the END of America’s 23-Year “QUAGMIRE” in Iraq

2026-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Overton News:

23 years later, the United States is completely withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The news broke early this morning from the War Department, signaling the formal end of the U.S. mission in Iraq, closing one of the longest and most disastrous chapters of America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. The war began in 2003 under President George W. Bush, but more than two decades later, President Donald Trump is the one overseeing the final withdrawal of the last remaining American forces from the country. He’s bringing them all home. It was finally happening. Nearly 4,500 U.S. service members lost their lives during the Iraq War. (Read more.)

The 4 Sins that Cry Out to Heaven for Vengeance

2026-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

From Trad West:

There are sins Scripture describes as ‘crying out to Heaven’. The Church preserves that warning in the Catechism, paragraph 1867.

Traditionally, they are grouped into four: deliberate murder [the shedding of innocent blood], the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor, and defrauding workers of their wages.

The sin of Murder:
Start with Abel. Cain killed his brother, but burying the victim did nothing to conceal the crime from God. His brother’s blood cried out from the ground.

The Sin of Sodom:
Then we have Sodom, whose sins brought it under the judgment of God. What was their sin? Scripture gives two descriptions:
>Arrogance, greed, neglect of the poor (Ezek 16,49-50)
>Sexual immorality and perversion (Jude 1,7)

The fire that fell on Sodom was a warning for all generations. Our generation is more wicked than Sodom, some exorcists say we’re more wicked than the generation of the flood. Food for thought. (Read more.)

Marie-Antoinette Receives Final Absolution

2026-09-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

In the Conciergerie, a priest gives Marie-Antoinette absolution as he passes her cell before her execution. (From Vive la Reine.)