Bad art speaks for itself, but this is even worse.

Other than the hideous colors in this fresco, located in the Madonna della Difesa Church in Montreal, there is something else even more disturbing about it.

From Fabrizio Bernardi:

Mussolini in Montreal

10 Novembre 2021 di Fabrizio Bernardi

The picture shown in this entry is from a fresco in a church in the Italian neighbourhood “le Petit Italie” in Montreal. The church is named “Madonna della Difesa” and was build up in 1919 by Italian immigrants, mostly from Molise. The fresco dates back to 1933 and celebrates “i Patti Lateranensi”, the agreement between the Italian state and the Vatican, when the Vatican finally recognized the Italian State in exchange to a mass of privilege for the Catholic Church in Italy. In the fresco one can see Mussolini riding a horse and, on the left in the back, the Pope XI, who signed the agreement.

Oh dear, and it gets worse.

Beyond its iconographic interest, the fresco of Mussolini is dense of historical meaning. At the time it was painted, 1933, Mussolini was at the apogee of his international popularity. He was highly admired by most of the state leaders who later became palatines of the war against Nazism and Fascism. He was celebrated by newspapers in USA, for instance the New York Time, and had been defined as the “man of the Providence” by the Pope himself. It is against the backdrop of this worldwide popularity that his emigrated compatriots in Montreal commissioned a fresco of him in their church. When liberal democracy champions paid homage to Mussolini, all the authoritarian traits of Fascism were already in place. While the quality of the fresco leaves much to be desired, it represents very well the blindness, complicity and self-destructive attraction of the so-called liberal democracies with Fascism.

Although your Tatler believes the best fate for this ghastly horror is painting it over in a nice neutral beige, on the other hand, it does serve a useful purpose in showing the limits of papal infallibility. Protestants often ridicule that doctrine, claiming that Catholics believe popes can never err or sin. Far from it. Popes, can and do fail on matters secular, sometimes spectacularly, such as Pius XI’s most unfortunate deal made with the fascists. Cover this monstrosity up or, if the church’s budget permits, replace it with beautiful art which can still be had in these ugly times.

With thanks to GWR.

Benedict XVI

Requiescat in pace.

From the Daily Caller.

Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said Pope Francis will preside over his predecessor’s funeral on 5 January at 9.30 CET in St. Peter’s Square, according to Vatican News.

It would be a gracious and loving tribute to the man who brought so many, including this writer, to embrace the One True Faith, were his successor to celebrate a Mass of Requiem for Benedict XVI, the patron saint of converts.

This is extraordinary. The man’s mind (such as it is) is now so far badly deteriorated he measures his successes by how many times he puts pen to paper to sign bills, never mind whether or not he has read them, which of course he hasn’t. God help us.

An ancestor’s bill for tuition and boarding, Yale College, 1882.

$52.98.

Even if they’re not Anglicans.

From the Daily Mail.

Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has hit out at the ‘woke’ rewriting of Christmas carols.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols said preserving traditional songs was more important than ‘sensitivities which come and go’.

His comments came after a Church of England carol service sparked outrage by featuring an ‘inclusive’ version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

Criminy, how can anyone take this forlorn institution seriously anymore? No wonder its churches are empty.

More foolishness from the Jesuits.

From America, the organ of the Jesuits:

Pope Francis was finally asked the question we have always wanted to hear him answer—what would he say to a woman feeling the pain of a sincerely discerned and unfulfilled call to priesthood? Unfortunately, when asked that pastoral question by executive editor Kerry Weber, the pope did not give a pastoral answer. Instead, he gave a clumsy theological discourse on Marian and Petrine theories, which the average Catholic would be forgiven for not knowing by heart. . .

It’s a shame the authors of this piece didn’t put down a few words explaining exactly what “average” Catholics are capable of knowing, but they obviously place themselves above them. Bickerstaff, a convert, can report his catechesis included the study of Marian and Petrine “theories” (doctrines would be a better word and besides, Marian doctrine is dogma, hence immutable) and had little difficulty understanding them. Neither apparently did any other of his fellow catechumens.

Francis’ suggestion that “woman is more, she looks more like the church, which is mother and spouse” relies on a literal interpretation of the “spousal metaphor” that reduces the extravagance of one’s relationship with God and discipleship to plastic figurines on a wedding cake.

How so? Please explain. How else should the spousal metaphor be interpreted? Ah, yes, in a way accommodating your desire for the ordination of women. We’ll take the literal interpretation, if you please, rather than some sort of plastic one (to use a word from the essay), bending and twisting it so as to bring it into accord with fashionable twentieth-century opinions.

That this blog is no fan of our present pope should be obvious, but Francis does deserve credit for resisting the exhortations of feminist extremists in the Catholic Church. Even he knows were he to acquiesce to their demands, it would lead to chaos, schism, and worse in Holy Church. History supports this view. Read the superb piece in the New Oxford Review titled, “The St. Louis Congress after 45 years,” by William Tighe, which recounts in sad detail the all-but-demise of the once mighty Episcopal Church, brought on by her surrounding to demands precisely those America’‘s editorial staff and other liberals in the Catholic Church make of our Pope.

Lower, lower, lower, he sinks.

Question: Will we ever reach the point where even Democrats concede this drooling idiot in the White House is unfit for office?

Answer: No.

From the New York Post:

A befuddled President Biden casually maligned the Irish while botching his wife’s family history during a gaffe-filled appearance in Delaware on Friday.

“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden inexplicably said as he greeted 102-year-old World War II veteran Ray Firmani during a town hall on veterans’ benefits in New Castle, Del.

“I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter,” Biden continued. “So, you know, I got a little Italian in me now, you know?”

The audience of military veterans and federal officials received the off-script comments in puzzled silence — but critics on Twitter took comic umbrage at the ethnic slur.

***

Biden’s mental acuity as the oldest-ever US president has been increasingly in question — particularly after he searched a crowd for the late Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.) in September, six weeks after publicly mourning her death and calling her family to offer condolences.

From here.

The late William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, now only a faint semblance of its former self when the founder was still alive, once said, to great wailing and gnashing of the teeth from his targets: “Liberals don’t care what you do so long as it’s compulsory.”

That was long ago though, and since then a new generation of the left has moved on from that quasi-grant of freedom to a stance far more autocratic. These days they care deeply about what you do, unless of course it’s something truly offensive to the decent majority of this country, i.e., drag queen story hours or mastectomies and castrations of children barely into their teens.

A glance at the intelligence [sic] seen above nicely reveals the current attitude of the liberal-left, which is: you will do what we tell you to do or we will put you in jail. Given the aggressive comprehensiveness of this extreme agenda, one imagines the drooling glee of these bills’s sponsors when sitting down to discuss their latest assaults on our basic liberties.

Your Tatler spent most his adult life in New York, the City, no less. Five years ago, sensing the soon-to-be takeover by the lunatics in the asylum, he fled, ending up in Taos. While New Mexico is hardly a bastion of libertarianism, it is at least a fair distance behind the progressives’s slow but steady coup d’état of the United States of America. Deo violente, he won’t be around when they eventually “progress” their way here.