Supermodels: Super pay.

The ladies who complain about the cost of their clothes might be encouraged to know just how much they contribute to the reduction in the gender pay gap. Not that the pay gap figures ever take supermodel pay into the calculations, dealing as it does in 'averages' as far as women are concerned while rolling in every male CEO on a $million a year.

Gisele. $30.5 Million.

OK, I am reminded that many ordinary ladies clothes are made in sweat shops in Bangladesh, as are quite a lot of chaps strides and shreddies. And those clothes are not generally strutted around on catwalks. But there are many slim-to-downright skinny gals on those catwalks 'earning' $squillions simply for wearing some clothes for five minutes at a time.

Ladies shreddies are also made in Bangladeshi sweat shops and they do get the catwalk treatment before being marked up from $1.50 to $150. These Supermodels impart much value it seems.

It is enough to make the average wage earning chap groan. In Oz that is, according to the ABS,  for 2016 >>> Full-time adult average weekly ordinary time earnings $ 1533.10. That is  Au$79721 per annum. 

To get into the bottom rungs of the top 20 of Supermodel per annum 'earnings' in 2016, where the worst that can happen is a zip break or the latte is too cool, the average chap, working in an office or on a roof or down a sewer or on a fishing boat or down a mine will have to work 62.7 years.

Bit of a pay gap there.

A supermodel is a highly paid fashion model who usually has a worldwide reputation and often a background in haute couture and commercial modeling. The term supermodel became prominent in the popular culture of the 1980s. 

Adriana $10 million

Supermodels usually work for prominent fashion designers and clothing brands. They may have multimillion-dollar contracts, endorsements, and campaigns. Supermodels have branded themselves as household names and worldwide recognition is associated with their modeling careers. They have been on the covers of magazines such as French, British, American, and Italian Vogue. Claudia Schiffer stated, "In order to become a supermodel one must be on all the covers all over the world at the same time so that people can recognise the girls."

Yep, that's the measure of worth. 

An early use of the term supermodel appeared in 1891 in an interview with artist Henry Stacy Marks for The Strand Magazine, in which Marks told journalist Harry How, "A good many models are addicted to drink, and, after sitting a while, will suddenly go to sleep. " 

By the Lord Harry he could have been describing a politician.

Karlie $10,000,000

Adriana Lima is one of the "New Supers" and the longest-running Victoria's Secret Angel. Emerging in the late 1990s, Gisele Bündchen became the first in a wave of Brazilian models to gain popularity in the industry and with the public. With numerous covers of Vogue under her belt, including an issue that dubbed her the "Return of the Sexy Model," Bündchen was credited with ending the "heroin chic" era of models. 

Following in her footsteps by signing contracts with Victoria's Secret, fellow Brazilians Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio rose to prominence; however, this "new trinity" were unable to cross over into the world of TV, movies and talk shows as easily as their predecessors due to their foreign accents and, apart from Gisele, were often confined to Swimsuit magazines instead of high fashion titles.


Several seasons later, they were followed by Eastern Europeans barely into their teens, pale, and "bordering on anorexic. 

Miranda  $6 Million pa.

They were too young to become movie stars or date celebrities; too skeletal to bag Victoria's Secret contracts; and a lack of English didn't bode well for a broad media career". 

It is a shame that being so uneducated and pale they could only aspire to the lower reaches of the pay scale, almost down to the level of The Clinton child who left school and into a $900,000 first job. 

The opportunities for superstardom were waning in the modeling world, and models like Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks took to television with reality shows like Project Runway & Germany's Next Topmodel and America's Next Top Model, respectively, to not only remain relevant but establish themselves as media moguls.

A new generation of models dubbed the "Instagirls" such as Gigi Hadid - >>$9 Million pa -  Hailey Baldwin, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, Irina Shayk, Kendall Jenner, have all developed their own unique model-personalities through social media, simply by their number of followers on sites such as Instagram. 

One has to imagine just what a model personality is about. Narcissism, perhaps?

This revolution has caused popular women who gained fame specifically through these sites, such as Alexis Ren, Amanda Steele and Cameron Dallas to be discovered by modeling agents as well.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley $9 Mil 

In today's modeling industry, designers often feature models in campaigns who have a large social media following such as Italian model and actress Monica Bellucci, who gained worldwide recognition whether through films or fashion appearance.


In addition, the most popular index for model updates and ranking, models.com have declared a new breed of Supers. 

This include models Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, Natalia Vodianova, Doutzen Kroes, Joan Smalls, Adriana Lima, Karen Elson, Lara Stone, Miranda Kerr, Liu Wen, Jourdan Dunn, Daria Werbowy, Kate Upton, Liya Kebede, Christy Teegan,and Natasha Poly as the New Supers in the fashion industry.

The mind boggles. Well a chap's mind does.  It is hardly surprising that so many small girls want to be models when they grow up.

That is when they choose that above being a pop star and warbling porno lyrics. That seems to pay extraordinarily well too. Far more than construction or fishing.

2016 pay. Top Ten. 

Cara Delevingne $8.5 Mil 

1. Gisele Bündchen ($30,500,000)
2. Adriana Lima ($10,500,000)
3. Karlie Kloss ($10,000,000)
4. Kendall Jenner ($10,000,000
5. Gigi Hadid ($9,000,000)
6. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley ($9,000,000)
7. Cara Delevingne ($8,500,000)
8. Candice Swanepoel ($7,000,000)
9. Liu Wen ($7,000,000)

10. Miranda Kerr ($6,000,000)

Keep going down to the 100 level and they are down to small bikkies of a bare  $2 million or, grief, even less !!

And they say there is a patriarchy that oppresses women.

Drink up.

Be thankful you don't have to slave away like these ladies.

If I were less kindly I might agree with the voice in the corner which suggested that these ladies were devoid of any useful, contributory skills and very likey a drain on society. But ..... I am kind.

A fine customer, Sean, carrying his pint close to his chest, approached the bar to tell me:

One supermodel who should be welcome at the Tavern for her intelligence, grace and upstanding virtue is Kathy Ireland.

Kathleen Marie "Kathy" Ireland (born March 20, 1963) is an American model and actress, turned author and entrepreneur. Ireland was a supermodel in the 1980s and 1990s, best known for appearing in 13 consecutive Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues. In 1993 she founded a brand marketing company, "kathy ireland Worldwide" (kiWW), which has made her one of the wealthiest former models in the world.

As a result of her career as a businesswoman, she had made a $420 million personal fortune by 2015 (Forbes). In 2012, $2 billion worth of products bearing her company's brand were sold.

She has remained involved with various charities and non-profit organizations dedicated to global women's rights and justice, education, emergency response and training for children, disease research and management, and HIV/AIDS.

I first heard of her because of her staunch pro-life views!

Bring her in Sean. I shall give her a pint.

It is so tough wearing clothes. But someone has to do it.

Pax

Public Child Abuse, paid for by Parents

Someone took Umbrage yesterday at some off-hand comment I made regarding the Manchester bombing of a pop concert. It was one paragraph in a longish piece with three other contributors talking about our options for living a half-decent life ala St Benedict. Fortunately I have a box of umbrage in a cupboard in the P&B so there is plenty more for them to take. No doubt I will see it depleted a bit after this post.

Having been around the traps for quite a long time, I do have opinions.  The small paragraph simply touched on a very difficult issue that most people could easily overlook. So I was 'just saying'. I generally allow plenty of space for others to give their opinions and views in the Tavern. Most of the space, in fact. I am well aware that far younger people who may still have the cradle marks on their backsides also have opinions. Who can escape noticing !  And there are those who get their opinions from Professors of gender politics, division and cultural marxism. 

There are those in-between youth and knackered old shitdom who also have opinions and one very vocal and forthright one was in the US Room today giving her view. 

Anne Barnhardt is just the sort of 'firm' woman that the 'toleratti' hate. Those non-judgmentalists who take the  immoral high-ground and seek 'diversity', signalling their virtue at every drop of a word they dislike and claiming to be offended, will be offended down to their socks today.

Anne has a motto: 

Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta.

Those not knowing Latin will need a translation so.....' Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy'. 

And no doubt the toleratti will shout 'Discriminayshun ! ' 

There are very few, if any, 'Holy Nations' around. 

She is a Catholic, of course, although she is also a convert. She has been there and done that too.

She came out all guns firing. 

Manchester: The Brutal Truth

WARNING: THIS POST IS ABOUT PORNOGRAPHY AND CHILD SEX ABUSE. THERE WILL BE NO PORNOGRAPHIC IMAGES, BUT THERE WILL BE PORNOGRAPHIC LYRICS CITED AND DISCUSSED.  I WILL NOT REDACT, BECAUSE REALITY IS NEVER REDACTED.

It is by now widely reported that the concert in Manchester, England that was bombed by a member-in-good-standing of the islamic political system, was by an American singer named Ariana Grande, and that Grande’s target audience was pre-teen and teen aged girls.   

Grande is a product of the odious Nickelodeon children’s cable channel machine, second only to Disney in its perversity and aggression in its attack on children’s souls.

 http://www.barnhardt.biz/2017/05/27/manchester-the-brutal-truth/

Not knowing anything about Grande, I did less than five minutes of reasearch and was stunned – yes, even in my severely jaded state I was stunned – by what I found.

Ariana Grande’s “music” is, very simply, pornography. 

Some might jump to the erroneous conclusion that five minutes is not much research, but Anne did not say she stopped at five, only that by five she was already stunned.  Odds are though that some folk will not care to notice that.

 EVERY SONG, and I do mean EVERY SONG has exactly the same theme: the physical, mechanical act of sex, including manual, oral and anal sodomy.  And almost always with mildly retarded black men (because most of her songs “feature” a rapper).

EVERY. SONG.

Ariana Grande’s target audience is pre-pubescent girls.  The eight-year old girl that was killed in the Manchester jihad attack and has become the face of the event, Saffie Rose Roussos, was Ariana Grande’s TARGET demographic. 

 We will come back to Saffie Rose in a moment.

First, we need to manfully face what we are dealing with in terms of Ariana Grande and the entire “entertainment” machine in the post-Christian world.   

Ariana Grande’s biggest hit is a song called “Side to Side”.  All the little girls know this song by heart, and sing along with gusto. Here is the end of the chorus:

This the new style with the fresh type of flow 

Wrist icicle, ride dick bicycle 

Come true yo, get you this type of blow 

If you wanna menage I got a tricycle

NOW I’M GOING TO WARN YOU AGAIN.  I’M GOING TO EXPLAIN THIS, AND I’M NOT GOING TO REDACT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

“Wrist icicle” is when someone manually masturbates a man, he ejaculates, and the giver then has ejaculate dripping from their wrist.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

“Ride dick bicycle”, fairly obvious, woman-on-top copulation.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

“Blow”, oral sex.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

“If you wanna MÉNAGE”, ménage a trois, fornication/sodomy with three people.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

The title of the song, “Side to Side” references the main part of the chorus:

I’ve been here all night  I’ve been here all day 

And boy, got me walkin’ side to side 

I’ve been here all night  I’ve been here all day 

And boy, got me walkin’ side to side (Side to side)

“Boy got me walkin’ side to side” means that she, the singer, or the eight year old girls who put themselves in the singer’s place as they emulate her, has been engaging in so much rough fornication and sodomy that she is unable to walk straight, or with a limping gait, due to soreness or even internal damage.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

Folks, this is one of Grande’s MILDER songs.

To prove that I’m not making a mountain out of a molehill, and that I haven’t simply cherry-picked an obscure Grande song, here is a clip of Grande appearing on the lesbian sodomite Ellen DeGeneres’ show, and DeGeneres, who herself targets young girls as part of her afternoon talk show demographic, asks Grande about these lyrics specifically, and then Grande goes on to PERFORM THE SONG.  

I won't show the  degenerate lesbian harpy  DeGeneres here so you will have to go to Ann's link (above) where she will show it.  It is a mark of our society in the west that such a woman is a 'leader' of women's thoughts, appearing on afternoon and morning TV like a soap opera, rousing angst against normality and  promoting  destructive permissiveness. This woman who represents less than 2% of women has a much larger following amonst the brain dead and the feminist culture.

Note that Grande herself projects as a young teenager, complete with ponytail and fringe bangs. And DeGeneres knew EXACTLY what “dick bicycle” meant.  It was all part of trying to sexualize and scandalize.   

This is why I say, and will say until the day I die that ALL SEX PERVERTS, ALL SODOMITES BOTH MALE AND FEMALE, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, ARE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO ALL CHILDREN.  

Sodomites are vampiric, and being Diabolical Narcissists they, by definition, hate and want to crush all goodness, innocence, happiness and ultimately faith out wherever they find it.  And kids tend to wear those things on their sleeves. Fricking demoniac monsters.

The other thing I was struck by in my cursory research of Grande’s song lyrics is the blasphemy and direct praise of sin qua sin.  It is satanic.

Song: “Right There”

Rap interlude by “Big Sean”:

You know I have some girls missionary (Oh), 

My black book of numbers thicker than the dictionary,

And Bible? I got it recycled.

That’s blasphemy, folks.

EIGHT. YEAR. OLD. GIRLS.

Song: “Bad Decisions”

Chorus:

You’ve become my favorite sin

Song: “Side to Side”

‘Cause tonight I’m making deals with the devil

And I know it’s gonna get me in trouble….

So, let’s get back to young Saffie Rose Roussos after establishing this context.

Are you ready for some seriously hard-core confrontation?

Here, Anne really got down to it. The entertainment industry would not have the influence that it has over young minds and souls were it not for parents shoving their children between the grinding stones and paying vast - and I mean vast - amounts of money to the millers and grinders. Try as one might, one cannot evade or escape this clear fact.

Who was Saffie Rose Roussos’ greatest enemy?  Was it that musloid piece of shit that murdered her body?  I say no.   

I say that Saffie Rose Roussos’ greatest enemy in this life was her mother.   

Her mother bought her Grande’s music, bought her the tickets to this public performance of pornography, and happily watched as her EIGHT YEAR OLD DAUGHTER sang and danced along with Grande’s stage show.   

Oh, wait.  I forgot to tell you about Grande’s stage show.  Non-stop aping of sex acts and – wait for it – GLORIFICATION OF HOMOSEXUALITY.  Guys grinding and thrusting on guys, girls making out with girls, all under the omnipresent Rainbow Flag of Sodomy and Perversion.   

Saffie Rose’s mother took her to a live porn show.   

Saffie Rose’s mother is lying critically wounded in a hospital, not aware that her daughter is dead.

If Saffie Rose’s mother survives, and if this were a morally sane Christian culture, she should be arrested and tried for felony child sex abuse, namely distributing and displaying pornography and obscenity to a child. The fact that Saffie Rose is dead not only DOES NOT mitigate the crime, it makes it all the more serious.

The musloid piece of shit had no power over Saffie Rose’s soul.  Killing someone, and in the case of Saffie Rose, killing someone almost instantly, does not scandalize, corrupt, or drive the person into hell.  What the musloid piece of shit did is deprive Saffie Rose of not only her natural life given to her by God, and only God’s to take away, but it deprived Saffie Rose of the chance to ever convert/revert to Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.   

I know that a BUNCH of you  reading this are converts or reverts.  Do you ever think about what would have become of you – us – had we died before we made it into The Church?  Yeah.  Well, for Saffie Rose, the state of her soul is locked-in.  She will never go to Mass, receive the Eucharist, hear the words of absolution in the confessional and KNOW what it means.  I will return at the end to Saffie Rose’s eternal fate and the possibilities there.

Now returning to the musloids.  Let us compare the post-Christian neo-pagan west to the musloid culture.  As I exposed in my video, “Islamic Sexuality: A Survey of Evil”, there is no culture on this planet with higher per capita rates of child sex abuse, sodomy, sexual perversion and Diabolical Narcissism than the musloid culture.  A child in a musloid culture that escapes rape or molestation has beaten the odds.  And we also know that lying and mendacity are key pillars and foundational planks of musloid culture. We all know this.

Now, consider, that even musloids, as satanic and far-gone as they are, when confronted about child sex abuse will, out of some deep, deep, DEEP vestigial sense of right and wrong, DENY that they sexually abuse their children, and will lyingly claim that child abuse is a high crime in musloid culture. 

It’s all bullshit, but at least they try to bullshit you.

Now, look at post-Christian, neo-pagan culture.  If you or I or anyone confronts the likes of Saffie Rose’s mother about the fact that she is trafficking pornography and sexual obscenity to her own daughter, the response will come instantly:

Damn right! 

Girl power! 

Who are you to judge? 

How dare you throw your rigorist fundamentalism at me? 

You’re sick with your obsession with your antiquated dogmas and medieval laws! 

I’m teaching my daughter about LOVE and TOLERANCE and INCLUSION and LOVE!   

All you do is judge and hate!

Musloids cut the clitorises of eight year old girls like Saffie Rose out with rusty razor blades, and then turn them into de facto sex slaves.   

Are we so far gone, so breathtakingly stupid and blind, that we actually believe that the antidote to that, the proper response, it to turn our little girls into the most revolting, disgusting class of uber-sluts humankind has yet seen? 

 BECAUSE THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM!  Make no mistake, that is EXACTLY the road that Saffie Rose’s mother had her on.

I repeat my position:  Saffie Rose’s mother was a far worse enemy to Saffie Rose than the musloid piece of shit who killed her.  The musloid went for Saffie Rose’s body to kill it.  Saffie Rose’s mother went for her own daughter’s soul.

So, to Saffie Rose’s soul. I do not know if she was baptized.  She was eight years old.  Right on the edge of what the Church holds as “the Age of Reason”.  She was clearly raised in a home with a depraved, wildly negligent mother, in a wildly post-Christian culture.  Baptism is by no means assured.  The clear depravity of her mother is a huge mitigating circumstance, obviously.   

Saffie Rose has all kinds of mitigating circumstances because of her youth.  BUT.  We must not forget the Dogma of Original Sin.  If she was not baptized, then we know she is not in heaven.  The question becomes, is she in hell, having reached the Age of Reason and having died wallowing in such sin and depravity, OR was she too young to be held accountable, and now rests eternally in the Limbo of the Innocents.

I gotta tell you, just now, typing the words Limbo of the INNOCENTS, I shuddered.  Saffie Rose died young, and died at the hands of a musloid murderer, but she did NOT die INNOCENT.  Words have meaning, and Saffie Rose was not INNOCENT.   

Her mother made damn sure of that, didn’t she?

Finally, a word about the Divine Providence.

Anne had some theological opinions you might like to follow up via her link. I was pulling a pint at the time she spoke. 

Ariana Grande announced just today that she will return to Manchester and perform a Memorial Benefit Concert.

This the new style with the fresh type of flow 

Wrist icicle, ride dick bicycle 

Come true yo, get you this type of blow 

If you wanna ménage I got a tricycle.

There will be some who will think Ariana is such a brave and nice girl to give a 'benefit' concert.  I hope Anne's words show just what it is. Rubbing salt in the wound simply does not get near.

Until Ariana Grande and her managers and promoters are arrested for public obscenity, and Saffie Rose’s mother is arrested and charged with felony child sex abuse, and men turn back to Jesus Christ, the Scourge of islam will continue to rape, pillage and kill.

I’m not optimistic.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on the soul of Saffie Rose Roussos.

There were a few bullet holes in the ceiling when Anne finished and I had filled her glass, but no carpets were damaged. 

I can see the storm-clouds gathering and have the Umbrage box lid open. 

Young women like Ariana are dragged down to hell by the filth that run the 'entertainment ' industry.  Men and women. She could be seen, quite easily and with some pity, as a victim of wicked people. 

But at 24 - the same age as Wg Cdr Guy Gibson, for example, when he did his duty for his country - she has to be held accountable for her actions. She struts and perverts; she sings filth. To little girls. For exorbitant amounts of money.

And of course there will be those who leap -where angels won't - to defend her style, her lyrics, her 'leadership', her progressive anti-morality.  They will find all the fatuous excuses. They will condemn Anne for being hard-nosed. Of course. What else can one expect. They too have an opinion.

I expect, too, they will take some umbrage from my box. I can see them criticisng even this old and sad Tavern keeper.

Please discuss peaceably.

And Pray for all of them.

Pax

The Ascension of the Lamb

The Thursday past and tomorrow, depending on your Bishop, is the feast of the Ascension, and tonight the Tavern feasts.

The Lamb who takes away the sins of the world leaves us to take His place at the right hand of the Father, and we here celebrate in the restaurant with.... lamb. 

Of course. 

In fine memory and anticipation of Holy Communion tomorrow.

A gentleman from a rival supplier came by to visit the kitchens. I say 'rival' in a friendly way. His supplies may not have the same qualities but are a fine enough back-up on occasion.

So he showed us a recipe and guided the chef.  He'd got his hands on Matt Moran's famous lamb shoulder recipe to share with us.  For those so inclined to take their time in the kitchen - I know some of you do - here is what we are serving tonight and how we prepared it.

This impressive yet simple dish pairs perfectly with the toasted caramel notes of the new James Boag Epicurean RED.

INGREDIENTS:

Brine solution

80 grams of salt

100 grams of sugar

2000 ml of water

1 teaspoon of black pepper

1 teaspoon of Juniper berries

2 cloves

The Lamb

1 lamb shoulder on the bone (about 1.3 kg), trimmed

25 ml of vegetable oil

1 bulb garlic

4 sprigs of rosemary

1 tablespoon of table salt

1 litre of lamb stock

METHOD:

1. In a mortar and pestle, crush the juniper berries, clove and black pepper.

2. Bring water to a boil and add salt, sugar, and crushed spices.

3. Once the salt and sugar has dissolved, remove from heat and allow to cool.

4. Strain through a fine sieve to remove the crushed spices.

5. Once cold, cover the lamb shoulder in the brine solution and leave in the fridge for 3 hours.

6. Remove lamb and place into a deep baking tray.

7. Pick the rosemary, reserving the stalks, and chop the garlic and rosemary and mix with the salt and vegetable oil.

8. Rub the rosemary mix over the lamb.

9. Pour the lamb stock into the tray, up to halfway up the lamb shoulder.

10. Place a sheet of baking paper over the whole tray and then tightly wrap in foil.

11. Place in a 100 ˚c oven for 10 hours, or until the lamb is tender and falls off the bone.

12. Remove foil and pour 1/2 the lamb stock through a fine sieve into a container.

13. Cover the lamb with foil and place into the fridge to cool.

14. While cooling, skim the fat from the lamb stock and place on the stove.

15. Bring to a boil and reduce by half.

16. Turn oven up to 180 ˚c and add reduced stock to lamb and place in oven, uncovered until the lamb is golden brown.

17. Remove from stock and serve, accompanied by a cold James Boag Epicurean RED.

And while you are sitting, eating your fill, perhaps you would like to see a few more fine recipes and some excellent Tasmanian Touring route suggestions.  Have a squiz at the James Boag exhibits. 

https://www.jamesboag.com.au/

Recommended.

Wash it all down with fine drink from the Tavern.

Pax

Circle the Wagons

What a dismal week. Nay, year. Nay, decade. Each year I get older and the world seems to grow smaller, shorter, nastier: the firmness recedes; the enemies charge out of their burrows and caves.   We are being attacked from all sides. Even the ordinary, average. person recoils. But I strap on my sword and say " 'Tis a good day for it !" Others look to defensible positions.  

OK, maybe the sword stays beneath the bartop and my towel gets damper as I wipe the tables, but we each have our way of life. I have had many ways of life.These days I serve.

A cursory glance around shows so many people falling off the cliff. 

Children are blown apart by a mad muslim boy while at a 'concert' given by a bad secular girl, both still children and both seemingly hateful of the western world and unwilling to live in any other. The son of refugees repays his samaritan country by killing innocents in the name of a creed that thrives on hatred and fear. The privileged  feminist girl struts lewdly and curses on stage, poisoning the minds of innocents and extolling the anti-virtues of LGBT, promiscuity, moral destruction and rejection of anything 'good' that the western world has provided to her. The parents let their children, including an eight year old, pay good money to cavort  and glorify mediocre mendacities and disdain put to song in almost adulation of that poor young creature.

Meanwhile God looks on and weeps. He gave us so much: we reject and curse.

The excuses abound in some sort of anti-pessimism. "Its nothing to do with Islam", say some people in power who know better.  Or should. "If you don't support same-sex marriage, I don't want you as a customer", says a pervert CEO here and a CEO there, intent on ruining the businesses of making coffee and flying aircraft. Gordon Bennett. 

While Islam spreads like a cancer, Christianity is failing.

It is enough to make a chap want to join a monastery. Hah ! Now there's an idea. It has been done before. And while monasteries can be of brick and stone, they can also be like the Tavern itself : of the mind.  Rod Dreher was speaking almost softly about just that. I let him have the floor while I pulled pints and listened.

The Benedict option

Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with yearning of what she had back home and how painful it is to live so far away. I wondered aloud why she and her American husband had emigrated to the United States from that idyllic landscape, the homeland she loved. ‘Because we wanted our children to have a chance to grow up Catholic,’ she said.

 https://spectator.com.au/2017/04/the-benedict-option/

My friend Laramie Hirsch, an American, would roll his eyes at the very idea that America is more friendly to Catholics. But hey. Things may be looking up with the First Lady being of the Faith.  I will let him say a few words later. But for now, we continue with Rod.

It’s not that she feared losing them to the Church of England — it’s that she feared them losing Christianity itself. 

She and her husband Chris, an academic theologian, are now raising their four young children in Philadelphia, a city with a historically large Catholic presence. Even so, Philadelphia is no safe haven, as the Robertses freely acknowledge. Christianity is declining sharply in the north-east of the United States, one of the nation’s least religious regions. The most recent studies confirm that the country is, at last, firmly on the same trail of decline blazed by the churches of Europe.

The collapse of  (christian) religion in Britain has been perhaps the most striking feature of the last generation. 

The sheer pace of the decline has been recorded by Damian Thompson in this magazine: church pews are emptying at the rate of 10,000 people per week. In 1983, some 40 per cent of the population declared itself Anglican. Now, it’s 17 per cent. To be a practising Christian in the West now is to belong to a minority.

How, then, should believers adapt to a society that is not just unsupportive but often hostile to their beliefs? 

In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, the Scottish moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre warned that the Enlightenment’s inability to provide a binding and authoritative source of morality to replace the Christian–Aristotelian one it discarded had left the contemporary West adrift. He likened our age to the era of the Roman Empire’s fall — a comparison that Pope Benedict XVI has also made.

The old believers, MacIntyre wrote, need to respond. Which means to stop trying to ‘shore up the imperium,’ and instead build ‘local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us’. MacIntyre famously concluded by saying that we in the West await ‘another — doubtless very different — St Benedict’.

MacIntyre chose Benedict as his model because the 6th-century saint’s inventive response to a religious collapse had enormous historical ramifications. The monastic communities he founded spread quickly throughout western Europe, and over the next few centuries laid the groundwork for the rebirth of civilisation in the West. 

Oddly, one 'sort' of chap  that could benefit from Benedict is the MTGOW,  who decry the pernicious influence of feminism and what it has done to turn so many men off women altogether - a difficult position to be in when women are so vocal and strutting the stages of our civilisation - and to whom I have before now said they might consider forming their own communities of men, if only they had a focus on Spirit. Unfortunately they too are in thrall to the image of the bad girl and desirous of much of the promiscuity that Mz Grande extols.

What would a St Benedict for our day say now? What would best ensure Christianity’s resilience and long-term survival? 

Christians do have to go back quite a long way to find a similar situation: by some estimates, Europe is more secularised now than at any time since Constantine’s conversion in the 3rd century.

What I call The Benedict Option is a choice made by an increasing number of Christians living in the secular West: to build the resilient local communities MacIntyre calls for. You don’t have to be cloistered as monastics to learn from the structure and practices of Benedictine life. The early Benedictines were an example of what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a ‘creative minority’ — a small group within a larger society that responds creatively to a crisis in a way that serves the common good.

Pope Benedict XVI was clear-eyed about the grim predicament facing European Christianity. Drawing on Toynbee’s analysis, he called on the Catholic flock to ‘understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality’.

It’s a novel claim: that monks are modern, not outdated relics of a medieval past. 

But  Father Martin Bernhard, a young American Benedictine in Norcia, stakes it with confidence. ‘People say, “Oh, you’re just trying to turn back the clock,”’ he told me. ‘That makes no sense. If you’re doing something right now, it means you’re doing it right now. It’s new, and it’s alive! And that’s a very powerful thing.’

Yes, but in the contemporary world, it also means being different. 

In order to be faithfully Christian now and for the foreseeable future, believers will have to become more like Orthodox Jews and Muslims in the way they live out their religion. They will have to recognise themselves as outsiders, and cease to care about conforming to the norms of secular society. They will have to live with far more spiritual discipline regarding prayer, worship, study, work, and asceticism, radically re-ordering their lives around the faith. This will look somewhat different depending on their particular tradition — Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox — but it will have to be taken on with rigour.

Take note, MGTOWs !! 

Some Christians will have to cut ties. Earlier this year, the Revd Dr Gavin Ashenden left the Church of England having previously been a chaplain to the Queen. ‘I’m not sure I see much point in a church that just wants to be accepted as a sort of not-too-irritating chaplain to a secular and hedonistic culture, which is what it seems to be becoming,’ he said.

The last straw for Ashenden was the Church’s milksop reaction to a Quran reading at St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow — a recitation that explicitly said that Jesus was not the son of God.

When one's neighbour deserts and joins the enemy, you really know that we have reached a point. Mind you, he was a protestant. One has to take  quite a few steps to move from one side to the other. 

Europe and the UK face a tremendous threat from radical Islam. Whatever else might be said of radical Islam, one cannot deny that its followers know what they believe, and are not ashamed of it.

Hmmmm.  Perhaps. But fear is their driver and hatred their steed. They are a far cry from Love and Mercy. 

But wait, comes the protest. Secular democracy has served the West pretty well. We are doing better in many measures of social health and wellbeing than we have in decades. What’s the problem?

It’s a fair point. What many don’t understand is the extent to which secular liberalism has fed off Christian teachings and virtues. The Enlightenment secularised Christian teachings about the sanctity of life and the dignity of the individual human person. But it could not come up with a stable grounding for those teachings in reason alone. For a long time, the West has been coasting on the residue of its Christian faith. But without basing our morality in transcendent values, how will we recognise threats to our humanity in the future (from, say, genetic manipulation), much less resist them?

Jonathan Sacks, formerly the chief rabbi, has called on Christians to learn from Jewish people how to be a creative minority in the contemporary world.

‘You can be a minority, living in a country whose religion, culture, and legal system are not your own, and yet sustain your identity, live your faith and contribute to the common good,’ he said. ‘It isn’t easy. It demands a complex finessing of identities. It involves a willingness to live in a state of cognitive dissonance. It isn’t for the faint-hearted.’

He also argues that Jews and Christians in Britain face two common enemies. 

On one side, a militant secularism that wishes to eliminate religion entirely. And on the other, a fanatical form of Islam that seeks a barbaric theocracy. It is a strange paradox and characteristic of our time: Christians will have to turn to modern Orthodox Jews, such as Lord Sacks, to learn how to live more faithfully as Christians.

The kind of faith that survives catastrophe is one that can perceive victory even in apparent defeat. This is the message of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people. It is the message of Christianity: the Saviour’s death is not the final word. It is the message that the believing Christian remnant in the West can make incarnate in their daily lives, in concrete and sacrificial ways.

This is no grim, white-knuckle counsel. 

Not to anyone who has met the Tipi Loschi, a merry confederacy of Italian Catholic families living in San Benedetto del Tronto, a small city on the Adriatic coast. They are counter-culturally orthodox in their Catholicism, but not angry. 

They draw inspiration from two English Catholics they regard as heroes: G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. -Tolkien. The community school is called Scuola Libera G.K. Chesterton, and the Tipi Loschi fancy themselves as ‘hobbits in the shire’.

These are Christians who are not deceived about the long odds facing Christianity in the West. They are filled with light, hope and joy. I asked Marco Sermarini, the middle-aged lawyer who heads the group, to divulge their secret. ‘We invented nothing,’ he said. ‘We are only rediscovering a tradition that was locked away inside an old box. We had forgotten.’

If a small flock of Italians perched on a cliff overlooking the Adriatic can rummage through the old curiosity shop of western Christianity and found a local Christian community on the writings of St Benedict, Chesterton, and Tolkien, who’s to say that the dusty crates in Christian Britain’s treasury don’t contain the seeds of that faith’s resurrection? 

As Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man: ‘Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.’

Small communities, families, which raise their children in separation and seclusion while still engaged with the world - but on their own terms - are not unfamiliar to me. I am privileged to 'belong' to such a group. The Traditional Latin Mass group in Southern Tasmania ( there is one in the north too) is built around several staunch, traditional Catholic families. It is growing.

One does not have to build an edifice atop a mountain, although, frankly, that ain't a bad idea. There were many and are still some around. The EU - oddly again - has a special dispensation for a Monastery in Greece that has its own passports and forbids women even stepping foot inside. 

They are 'Greek Orthodox' Monks, and I am not suggesting you become a monk. Not that it is a bad idea. Also down here not far from the Tavern a new  Benedictine Priory is forming with an American priest from a French Monastery leading the way. 

Tasmania’s first Catholic monastery 

......is to be established this month, under the Prior leadership of Fr Pius Mary Noonan of the Saint Joseph de Clairval Abbey of Flavigny, France.

 http://www.hobart.catholic.org.au/media/news/tasmania-welcomes-benedictine-priory

The Notre Dame Priory will follow the Benedictine Rule, and it will initially be located in Hobart. The priory will welcome a small number of young men from around Australia, and Archbishop Julian will provide guidance and leadership to the new religious order in Tasmania.

The priory will teach the Benedictine life, which focuses on living a common life while praying and working together. Fr Pius Mary will initially be the only monk on a permanent basis at the priory.

“Essentially we can say that a monk’s life is about looking for God, seeking God as St Benedict says.

“Seeking God is going to obviously manifest itself in many ways, primarily through the sacred liturgy. Benedictines are known for their attachment to the celebration of the liturgy with great solemnity,” Fr Pius Mary said.

Fr Pius Mary first started visiting Australia to provide retreats in 2007, and it was through this experience that he encountered a number of men wanting to engage more in the monastic lifestyle.

“I must say that from the first time I began really to meet Australians, I was attracted and very happy to get to work with them.”

The monks of Notre Dame Priory will wear white habits in a sign of piety to Mary.

“It is a distinctive trait of devotion to our lady, and I see it as being a profession of our faith in her protection,” explains Fr Pius Mary.


Fr Pius Mary is originally from Kentucky in the USA, and he joined the abbey in Flavigny in 1984, after receiving the call to monastic life while studying at university.

The Tavern Keeper is a 'supporter'.  But then I am, after a long time away being a warrior and healer, a Traditionalist Catholic.

Laramie can tell you more about what that entails than I have time for. What with me having to pull pints and wipe tables. So I shall let his speak.

Being A Traditionalist Catholic

In recent months, I've been chit-chatting with a new convert to Catholicism.  I was not the one responsible for the evangelism, mind you.  I've never been good or successful at evangelization (though, I just keep on trying).

 http://thehirschfiles.blogspot.com.au/2017/05/being-traditionalist-catholic.html

Nevertheless, this fellow came to me after he came into the Church.  He had a few questions about what was going on in the Church Militant.  Anyone familiar with the problems stemming from Pope Francis, Vatican II, the priest pedophile scandal, and Freemasonic modernist infiltrators and the like will be familiar with the kinds of questions he asked. 

Ultimately, my friend was having a moment of psychoanalysis.  And, in the end, he had to ask the question: What Does It Mean To Be A Traditionalist Catholic? 

Laramie gave a link to his fellow's  blog, which you can find by clicking on Laramie's link.

I wish my friend all the best in taking his new-found faith in Christ and His Church seriously, in spite of all attacks from modernists. 

And one thing I must repeat to him and everyone who reads my writing: this stance I've taken with Traditional Catholicism has taken almost a decade to realize.   

The problem with the Catholic Church right now is complicated.   

There's a lot of history and a lot of factionalism.  To make it even more complicated, the axioms of this stance are also built on some rudimentary knowledge of dogma and moral teaching that a lot of people do not look into.  And I think that this is the reason that Traditional Catholics are rare and often pedantic. 

But I recommend Traditional Catholicism to everyone. 

It's a shame that we are left to fend for ourselves in the social jungle to find out the truth about Jesus Christ's Church.  There's deception and confusion all around us.  Gone are the days when graces were an easier thing to attain, and the realm was ordered in such a way as to foster the liberty of your faith.  Now, the converts are comprised of stragglers who may or may not find their way to what is going on. 

I had to move along to another bar, but I do recommend you follow his link. He has much to say that can benefit. 

Unlike Greek orthodox monks I do not stop women coming into the Tavern. Nor Protestants. Not even Atheists and Mulsims. I am a bit wary though, especially of the latter who are clear enemies. I do not stop even feminists and other assorted, misled sinners. We all are sinners even though some of us do strive to be free of the damnedness of our human frailties. 

We need Grace.

My Supplier gives it, freely, and often unasked-for. 

Drink up.

Pray for Mz Grande.

Pax