AS THE LIGHT of Christmas once again penetrates the darkness of our benighted modern world, I want to devote this last Editor’s Desk of 2024 to a word of thanks to subscribers to the print edition of The Remnant. Simply put, I want to thank you for, against all odds, staying sane, human, and Catholic for yet another year.
This Christmas, I appreciate our battletested bond of friendship more than ever. Maybe it’s because as we head into our 58th year together here at The Remnant, it’s clear that we’ve become trench mates in a very long war. And I suppose it has something to do with a mutual willingness to hold onto something from the past that has been discarded by so many. Our brotherhood in Christ and Tradition has come to mean everything to me.
Soon it will all be over, and then Christ will return to make all things new again. And there’s nothing that angry old Grinch in White in Rome can do to stop it anymore, his cringy Modernism having become about as avantgarde as a tie-dyed tee shirt.
But there’s something else, too…something to do with staying human in a world that’s being handed over to inhuman and increasingly inhumane machines. In that world, it’s the little things that matter more than they used to. The little notes, for example, that many of you write on the back of Remnant invoices – just a few words of encouragement in blue or black pen ink reminding me that real people with minds and souls and hearts still inhabit a real world. Not everything, in other words, is “fake and gay.”
Maybe it’s also because I sense that you, like me, have grown tired of the sterile online virtual reality with its cold detachment from the beautiful reality God created for us – the one that can’t quite be reached through the artificial filters of monitors and a hundred million Zoom calls.
I suppose many things account for this feeling of Christmas gratitude. Whatever it is, I’m grateful to God for seating us together in this strange coliseum full of virtual lions and robotic gladiators. No matter what insanity happens next, we’re doing this thing called Survival together, while keeping faith and hope alive.
Do you remember when we were kids, and the days were so much longer? I do, too. These days we seem to be sitting down for breakfast every fifteen minutes.
I’m really very grateful for your willingness to hold onto the past, even down to the newsprint you hold in your hands right now, covered in ink and words, pictures and prayers, and depictions of memories of how things used to be in a saner world that wasn’t so dependent on speakers and Wi-fi. You remember it and so do I; and so, we can console ourselves with shared memories of better days.
I have it in mind that if so many of you are willing to still read newsprint, you probably still entertain yourselves as we all used to – with conversations with live human beings, where everyone looked into each other’s eyes rather than zombie-like into the infinite abyss of the little smart screens that make imbeciles of us all.
This article appeared in the Remnant Newspaper's Christmas issue.
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I imagine your family still sitting down together for dinner in the evenings, and sharing stories of what you recall from memory, without someone constantly trying to Google and factcheck the fun out it all.
Part of being a traditional Catholic is preserving that pre-Internet family life, with its singing around campfires and pianos, its recitation of bits of poetry, and all the wonderful storytelling about life and childhood, God and church, old loved ones no longer with us and their little replacements that just arrived.
Do you remember when we were kids, and the days were so much longer? I do, too. These days we seem to be sitting down for breakfast every fifteen minutes.
Do you remember when people were more interesting to talk to…I mean before they got smartphoned? I remember our mailman, for example, from back in the day. He spoke English, drove a funny truck, and had a name we all knew. He’d grown up in the same town we did. His name was Ken. I can remember waking up on cold December mornings to the sound of my mother’s voice in the kitchen, wishing Ken a Merry Christmas and apologizing for the fact that our dog was in the middle of the street again. Every Christmas my mother would have us run a little gift out to Ken on Christmas Eve morning. Why? Because he was the best mailman in the world, of course. If we weren’t home for some reason, Ken would just walk right in and deliver his packages anyway.
Do mailmen still come to doors anymore? Or is that too dangerous? Do people know his name. Do they still give Christmas gifts to mailmen? I wonder about that when I see the big gray Amazon truck pull up. There’s usually a Middle eastern woman behind the wheel. She seems nice enough but doesn’t have a word of English. If she has to talk to us, she uses a translator app on her smartphone.
I don’t know her name.
So much has changed since those days when everyone knew your name. I remember snowy Christmas Eves, when we used to walk down the toboggan hill behind Hoffman’s house on our way to Midnight Mass. It was quicker to cut through our neighbors’ yards, and nobody ever got shot for doing it. They were all going to Midnight Mass, too, in fact.
Sometimes we’d meet for poppyseed bread and hot chocolate in the middle of the night after Mass. Other times, we kids would go skating down at the firehouse. The guys down there would flood their little field, and we’d skate in the moonlight, anxiously awaiting the huge Christmas Day celebrations with the aunts and uncles.
My father never locked the house because there was no need. And the church doors were always open, too. Our old pastor’s light was always on in the parlor of the rectory because, well, that’s where he lived. The church was his home, and, in many ways, it was ours, too. Most everyone in the neighborhood was Catholic, including Ken the Mailman, and that was the strength of our little community surrounding the old church steeple of St. John’s.
He/she/they has/have no future because he/she/they has/have no past worth remembering. This dismal darkness is where the war on Christ the King has ended, and they lost.
Vatican II changed all that with its New Mass and its locked churches. Diversity came in some years later and blew it all to hell, of course. It’s a little challenging getting the town together for Christmas celebrations when half the townsfolk are Muslim. No offense to Muslims, but you get the point. The first casualties of the Diversity Steamroller were Christian community celebrations.
They didn’t attack Christmas outright at first. They just supplanted it with fat elves and holiday songs about talking reindeer written by Jewish guys. It was sort of like how Freemasonry didn’t attack the Catholic Church outright at first, either. They just supplanted it. Today, it’s Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, Muslims and Hindus, Happy Holidays and apostate Catholics. Nobody even knows why they’re buying presents for “holiday” celebrations anymore. They just do it. No wonder so many kids need therapists.
The good news? Well, we’re still here. We all sequestered ourselves in our houses and built little Catholic confessional states of our own. And, for the most part, it worked. We survived. We’ve lived long enough, in fact, to see the Revolution’s imminent demise here in 2024. There was a young man waiting on me in the department store today. He had breasts, long straggly home-dyed hair, painted press-on nails, and his name was Beonce. And he may have been the saddest young man I have ever seen.
He/she/they has/have no future because he/she/they has/have no past worth remembering. This dismal darkness is where the war on Christ the King has ended, and they lost.
A time when boys were boys...
With the world having become so tragically “fake and gay”, there is obviously no sustainability to any of it anymore. What’s left of the monsters who invaded us is the rotting collective cadaver of a petulant child who didn’t live past adolescence. They failed. They are dying. Their nurseries are abortuaries, their streets are warzones as the Revolution of Vatican II has been quietly wasting away in a shallow and unmarked grave. Today, the stink of its decomposition has become so fetid that the churches are closing, and the Catholics are being evacuated. Nobody’s inside. A few valiant priests hang on but usually end up seeking refuge in one of the sanctuary camps of Tradition.
Soon it will all be over, and then Christ will return to make all things new again. And there’s nothing that angry old Grinch in White in Rome can do to stop it anymore, his cringy Modernism having become about as avantgarde as a tie-dyed tee shirt.
All we need to do is hold on to the true meaning of Christmas just a little while longer. Tell our children the story. . . make it clear to them that Christmas marks the birthday of an actual historic figure Who really lived, Who was born in Bethlehem, Who had a mother whom we know and call by name. He is with us, and in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph. And that’s the only reality we need to hold on to for a while longer. God will see to the rest.
And so, in this last Editor’s Desk of 2024, I’m not asking anything of you, dear friends, other than that you accept my sincere gratitude for standing with The Remnant all these years, for holding the Catholic ground, for refusing to surrender, for remaining in the Catholic trenches, and for staying blessedly human.
I wish you and your family every blessing in the New Year, and I look forward to fighting at your side for everything that matters and for as many years as our good God sees fit to give us. We’re in this together, for the long haul, for the rest of our lives, and I’m proud to stand with the clans of holy Tradition, the Children of Light, and remnant of Christian believers. I’m proud to stand with you.
From all of us here at The Remnant, Merry Christmas to the very best subscribers, friends, and allies in the world. God bless you all.
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