When Pope Francis complains "In Vaticano c’è aria di frociaggine", he means the Vatican is still the hotbed of homosexual sin The Pillar said it was in 2018

"the nuns bring forth pretty little monks"

 

The Renaissance Vatican infamous for papal concubinage seems a golden age compared to this:

Analysis of commercially available signal data obtained by The Pillar, which was legally obtained and whose authenticity The Pillar has confirmed, shows that during a period of 26 weeks in 2018, at least 32 mobile devices emitted serially occurring hookup or dating app data signals from secured areas and buildings of the Vatican ordinarily inaccessible to tourists and pilgrims.

At least 16 mobile devices emitted signals from the hookup app Grindr on at least four days between March to October 2018 within the non-public areas of the Vatican City State, while 16 other devices showed use of other location-based hookup or dating apps, both heterosexual and homosexual, on four or more days in the same time period.

The data set assessed by The Pillar is commercially available and contains location and usage information which users consent to be collected and commercialized as a condition of using the app.

Extensive location-based hookup or dating app usage is evident within the walls of Vatican City, in restricted areas of St. Peter’s Basilica, inside Vatican City government and Holy See’s administration buildings including those used by the Vatican’s diplomatic staff, in residential buildings, and in the Vatican Gardens, both during daytime hours and overnight.  

More.

Masuccio Salernitano on the phony, immoral, infanticidal Franciscan and Dominican begging friars of 15th century Italy

  They cheat, steal, and fornicate, and when they are at the end of their resources, they set up as saints and work miracles . . . bring with them confederates who pretend to be blind or afflicted with some mortal disease, and after touching the hem of the monk's cowl, or the relics which he carries, are healed before the eyes of the multitude. All then shout 'Misericordia', the bells are rung, and the miracle is recorded in a solemn protocol. ... The nuns ... bring forth pretty little monks or else use means to hinder that result. And if anyone charges me with falsehood, let him search the nunneries well, and he will find there as many little bones as in Bethlehem at Herod's time. ... The best punishment for them would be for God to abolish Purgatory; they would then receive no more alms, and would be forced to go back to their spades.

 

 

-- Tommaso Guardati, aka Masuccio Salernitano (1410-1475), quoted in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 283f.

The Lutheran Reformation saved the Papacy

The greatest danger of all--secularization--the danger which came from within, from the Popes themselves and their 'nipoti', was adjourned for centuries by the German Reformation. ... This alone had made the expedition against Rome (1527) possible and successful, [and] so did it compel the Papacy to become once more the expression of a world-wide spiritual power, to raise itself from the soulless debasement in which it lay, and to place itself at the head of all the enemies of this reformation. ... In the face of the defection of half Europe, was a new, regenerated hierarchy, which avoided all the great and dangerous scandals of former times, particularly nepotism ... It only existed and is only intelligible in opposition to the seceders. In this sense it can be said with perfect truth that the moral salvation of the Papacy is due to its mortal enemies. ... Without the Reformation ... the whole ecclesiastical State would long ago have passed into secular hands.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 79.

The Italians were first in the higher learning of the Renaissance

The Italians have carried away the bell from all other nations, as may appear both by their books and works.

-- George Hakewill (1578-1649)

Imagine how unreliable "eyewitness" accounts from antiquity must be when normal vision not requiring correction is such a rarity anyway

 

 

 

Reported here: 

In 2016, approximately 76 percent of adults in the U.S. stated they wore some form of vision correction.  

Widespread use of eyeglasses is an outgrowth of their late invention, during the Italian Renaissance, with ubiquitous production with plastic lenses dating only from the 1980s. Before that, things looked, well, kind of grim for an overwhelming majority of people.

St. Paul, who probably had very bad eyes from birth, yet boasted that he had seen the Lord.

Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord? 

-- 1 Corinthians 9:1

Paul's conversion, however, bespeaks a probably lifelong preoccupation with his poor eyesight. It specifically involves being blinded, and then scales falling from his eyes when he recovers his sight well enough to be considered normal again, and this again miraculously (Acts 9:8f., 18, 27).

But evidently this was not a full restoration of his sight.

According to Acts 23:1ff. Paul still could not spot the high priest in a crowd of people he was addressing. He says the Galatians would have given him their own eyes if they could have (Galatians 4:15), admitting that he is infirm (Galatians 4:13), and that he must write to them using "large letters" (Galatians 6:11). The Galatians knew the man and the truth about the man.

By the time he is dictating Romans, he is now older and his eyes have grown so bad that he requires an assistant to write the epistle. This person even makes an appearance at the end of it in order to explain why the penmanship doesn't match Paul's (I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord. -- Romans 16:22).

We are to believe Paul was granted a miracle of an appearance of Jesus, but not a complete healing.

Like so much else outside the miracles recounted in the Synoptic tradition performed by the historical Jesus, one cannot help but feel let down by these details involving the achievements of the risen Saviour.

And a post-conversion St. Paul who could not see well enough to recognize the high priest may reasonably be doubted to have been able to recognize Jesus pre-conversion, risen or otherwise.

Isn't that obvious from Paul's own testimony?

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 9:5

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 22:8

Who art thou, Lord? -- Acts 26:15

The good old days, when the sexual sins of Catholicism in Italy seemed more, shall we say, conventional

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners--for example, to Comines--appeared so remarkable. The two things went naturally together. ... In Italy ... there no longer existed a princely house where ... bastards were not patiently tolerated. ... The fitness of the individual, his worth and capacity, were of more weight than all the laws and usages which prevailed elsewhere in the West. It was the age, indeed, in which the sons of the Popes were founding dynasties.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 12.

 

Culture and enlightenment are powerless against delusions such as astrology

But in another way . . . antiquity exercised a perilous influence. It imparted to the Renaissance its own forms of superstition. ... The belief in a Divine government of the world was in many minds destroyed by the spectacle of so much injustice and misery. Others, like Dante, surrendered at all events this life to the caprices of chance . . .. But when the belief in immortality began to waver, then Fatalism got the upper hand, or sometimes the latter came first and had the former as its consequence. The gap thus opened was in the first place filled by the astrology of antiquity, or even of the Arabs. ... It is profoundly instructive to observe how powerless culture and enlightenment were against this delusion; since the latter had its support in the ardent imagination of the people, in the passionate wish to penetrate and determine the future. Antiquity, too, was on the side of astrology.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1945), 313f.

On the origin of "The West"

"What is Europe?" is an interesting question.

Old it certainly is, and we conservatives tend to think of Europe as the center of everything as a consequence of a long historical development, especially in the wake of the rise of America as the western outpost of "The West" to become the leader of the free world. But from the beginning, obviously, it was not so, but how?

The Greek mythology put the navel of the world, the center, at Delphi, to which east and west came to consult the famous oracle. From this mythology Europe specifically was first associated with the west conceptually from the simple geographic situation of the oracle's position beneath Parnassus to its west, as first expressed in the "Homeric" Hymn to Pythian Apollo, perhaps dating to as early as the 6th century BC:

"Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said:

'In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.'”

And so we "of the west", of Europe, are so because the Greeks originally said so.

The Romans were the first westerners to acknowledge their debt to Greece, and they demonstrated it in so many ways, but chiefly through imitation of Greece's literature and art, the surest form of flattery. Through conquest of Europe they spread that sense of debt to Greece to all the peoples of the continent, and beyond.

That is why we still feel the pull of Europe, despite all the forces arrayed against us seeking to break its spell over us. But the center is really Greece. If we want to be stronger as the people of The West, we ought to take a cue from those old Romans and commit ourselves anew to imitating the best ourselves, just as the great men of the Renaissance did. And one can do it in English, too, simply by immersing oneself in the authors which formed the basis of Johnson's Dictionary, for example. It's what I do everyday, just to anchor myself to the best of the past in order to make the best a part of my too often sorry, vulgar present.