Catholics From England

"Edward the third, your King of rich renowne, Against the French did use his conquering sworde: Mauger their beardes, he did possesse their Crowne, The French were faine, to serve him as their Lord. Take courage then, maintaine your Countries right, Gainst Rabsica, in Gods name enter fight."

"Edward, however exceptionable his character may appear on the head of justice, is the model of a politic and warlike King: He possessed industry, penetration, courage, vigour, and enterprize: He was frugal in all expences that were not necessary; he knew how to open the public treasures on a proper occasion; he punished criminals with severity; he was gracious and affable to his servants and courtiers; and being of a majestic figure, expert at all bodily exercises, and in the main well proportioned in his limbs, notwithstanding the great length and the smallness of his legs, he was as well qualified to captivate the populace by his exterior appearance, as to gain the approbation of men of sense by his more solid virtues."

"Edwardus Primus Scotorum Malleus hic est, 1308. Pactum Serva"

"He was so handsome and great, so powerful in arms, That of him may one speak as long as the world lasts. For he had no equal as a knight in armour For vigour and valour, neither present nor future."

"The greatest of all the Plantagenet kings was Edward III. Edward inherited the throne as a teenage puppet king under his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer, who were responsible for the removal of Edward II. He soon shook off their influence, and the next three, triumphant decades of his reign are described in Part VI, 'Age of Glory.' In these years, the Plantagenets expanded in every sense. Under the accomplished generalship of Edward, his son the Black Prince, and his cousin Henry Grosmont, England pulverized France, and Scotland (as well as other enemies, including Castile), in the opening phases of the Hundred Years' War. Victories on land at Halidon Hill (1333), Crécy (1346), Calais (1347), Poitiers (1356) and Najera (1367) established the English war machine – built around the power of the deadly longbow – as Europe's fiercest. Success at sea at Sluys (1340) and Winchelsea (1350) also gave the Plantagenets confidence in the uncertain arena of warfare on the water. Besides restoring the military power of the English kings, Edward and his sons deliberately encouraged a national mythology that interwove Arthurian legend, a new cult of St George and a revival of the code of knighly chivalry in the Order of the Garter. They created a culture that bonded England's aristocracy together in the common purpose of war. By 1360, Plantagenet kingship had reached its apotheosis. Political harmony at home was matched by dominance abroad. A new period of greatness beckoned."

"The royal hero of this time was Edward I, a tall and relentless king who was said to be so fierce that he once literally scared a man to death. Under Edward's belligerent leadership, the English were finally induced to cease fighting one another and turn their attentions on their neighbours: Scotland and Wales. Edward I's brutal attempts to become the master not only of England but the whole of Britain are the subject of the 'Age of Arthur.' The popularity of Arthurian tales and relic-hunting increased as a new mythology of English kingship was explored. Edward cast himself as the inheritor of Arthur (originally a Welsh king) who sought to reunite the British Isles and usher in a great new age of royal rule. Despite flurries of outrage form his barons, who began to organize political opposition through the nascent political body known as parliament, Edward very nearly succeeded in his goals, and his influence over England's relations with Scotland and Wales has never entirely waned."

"But the chiefe advantage which the people of England reaped, and still continue to reap, from the reign of this great prince, was the correction, extension, amendment, and establishment of the laws, which Edward maintained in great vigour, and left much improved to posterity: For the work of wise legislation commonly remain; while the acquisitions of conquerors often perish with them. This merit has justly gained to Edward the appellation of the English Justinian."

"There is a recent photo of Pope Francis doing the rounds on social media that shows him walking alone, without security people or a private secretary, across a Vatican courtyard. In the early days of his pontificate, it would have been seen as Francis breaking through the stuffy conventions of the Vatican: being his own man. Five years on, it is instead viewed as symbolic of Francis’s loneliness. Here is a man struggling to find allies or support from the Catholic faithful in his stalled efforts to reform the church and failing attempts to tackle the abuse crisis."

"Those who have never fought for the colours they fly, should be careful about criticising those who have."

"I'm interested in your answers to my questions, not to the questions you wished I'd asked."

"The pope has been up against an intransigent church bureaucracy. Vatican officials have proved unwilling to cooperate with the commission; nor has it been furnished with enough resources. But above all, there has been cultural resistance within the church over abuse. The clerical caste is one shaped by obedience and a deep fear of sullying the reputation of the church. The relationship of bishop and priest is a paternal one; if the priest errs, the bishop may focus on forgiveness of the miscreant rather than punishment of an abuser, while his greatest focus is on avoiding publicity. But the church is now reaping what it sowed: like long-festering sores, the suppressed scandals are erupting everywhere."

"We have a real choice: either we choose to shape events or we will be shaped by them. Over many centuries, the people of the United Kingdom have got into the habit of being actors in this world, rather than being acted upon by it."

"This, if not an act of war, was certainly a warlike act by the Russian Federation…"

"Leaders stand up for their men. They encourage them to try and defend them when they fail."

"There must be some leeway; the church operates across the world, including in totalitarian states where a fair criminal trial is unlikely for the accused. But some standards regarding inquiries and treatment of victims must surely be possible, as well as clear guidance on assessment of recruits to the priesthood. And the exit door for bishops needs to change. ... We Catholics deserve this. Especially the children the church failed to protect."

"Fundamentally I think soldiering is pretty similar to politics. It's not about you, it's all about the people you serve with. It's all about the results, it's all about the operation, it's all about the mission. The reason we're here at all in politics is to serve the people."

"The task is not to win the political centre ground – it is gridlocked and dead – but to transform it. A new social politics of democracy must be capable of creating the conditions for recovery, and setting out a set of principles and a political direction for the future, and it must also address the threat of global warming. The boom is over. In the future there will be less to go round and so let us share it out fairly amongst ourselves and embark on the deep and long transformation that will bring about a good society. It will be the great challenge of our time, and it will shape the lives of generations to come."

"We need a philosophy of the individual in society and a political culture that values the social goods that give security, meaning and value to people: home, family, friendships, good work, locality and communities of belonging. These were the concerns of the 19th century debates between social liberals and ethical socialists which created the modern spirit of the left. We need to re-invent a plural and ethical socialism rooted in the ordinary life of the individual producing and relating in society. The central value of this socialism, alongside liberty, is equality."

"Christianity and other faith traditions also teach us that the common good concerns the relational. Not lone egos, nor an anonymous mass. But instead shared bonds that are both convivial and sacrificial. That’s because human beings flourish as persons who freely associate with others in groups, communities and nations."

"The main problem with current neo-liberal globalisation is that it detaches economic and political power from locality, tradition and interpersonal relationships. That’s because it makes a fundamental assumption about human nature: that we are essentially selfish, greedy, isolated individuals who seem to maximise our own individual happiness or short-term pleasure. Purely individual interests ultimately clash. This conflict is then supposedly resolved by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market and the visible hand of the state. In consequence we are left with an increasing centralisation of power, a growing concentration of wealth and an ever-more atomised society."

"Religions remind us that we are not necessarily selfish, greedy and prone to violence. Nor however, are we purely selfless and unconditionally cooperative. Rather, most people naturally and rightly seek mutual recognition – a fulfilling of themselves alongside others. They want to be at home in the world, but they don’t usually want to destroy the other home-dwellers."

"Labour should have an 'English Labour'. It should embrace a modern, radical Englishness, or else England and patriotism will simply be a right-wing politics of loss and sourness."

"To this end I suggest we need to look to an idea deeply rooted in Christian life and thought. The idea of the Common Good. The Common Good is concerned with personal and mutual flourishing in terms of our talents and vocations. It is about treating people as they really are: as human beings who belong to families, localities and communities. To shared traditions, interests and faiths. Not as abstracted, rootless, atomised individuals that dominates neo-classical or neoliberal thinking -the thinking that dominates our life."

"'Amen', ... in Hebrew, is one of a cluster from a root which signifies reliability, integrity and truth. ... Our utterance of it is acknowledgment of God's 'Amen', which always goes before. The recognition of God's integrity and truthfulness, unswerving faithfulness in execution of his promises, is so central to Judaism's faith that 'Amen' may almost be taken as a name for God. We might miss this when we read, in the sixty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, that 'he who takes an oath in the land shall swear by the God of truth', but the Hebrew here, if rendered literally, would be 'by the God Amen'."

"It’s easy to mock video gamers as dorky loners in yellowing underpants. Indeed, in previous columns, I’ve done it myself. Occasionally at length. But, the more you learn about the latest scandal in the games industry, the more you start to sympathise with the frustrated male stereotype. Because an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers, are terrorising the entire community – lying, bullying and manipulating their way around the internet for profit and attention."

"It was perfectly consensual. When I was the 14, I was the predator."

"There's nothing the right wing loves more than a black person willing to say black people are the real racists or a queer person willing to say queer people are the real threat. If you're queer or a person of color and you're telegenic and articulate and willing to sell the rancid cum rag that passes for your soul, you'll never have to do an honest day's work again in your life."

"He's a trickster and trickster figures emerge in times of crisis and they point out what no one wants to see and they say things that no one will say."

"Shapiro has always been deeply conservative and does not pretend to be objective. But he says his market niche is giving cleareyed reads of current events, not purely partisan rants. He is often compared to his former colleague at , Milo Yiannopoulos. On the surface, they seem the same. Both speak on college campuses. Both draw protests. Both used to work for Mr. Bannon at Breitbart. Both are young. In fact, they are very different. Mr. Yiannopoulos, a protégé of Mr. Bannon, was good at shocking audiences, saying things like "feminism is cancer." But critics say that he was empty of ideas, a kind of nihilistic rodeo clown who was not even conservative. Mr. Shapiro broke with Mr. Bannon last year, saying Breitbart had become a propaganda tool for Mr. Trump."

"Yiannopolous makes nearly no arguments in his presentations. [...] No one will be educated on the reasoning of the Right by engaging with him."

"He’s a trickster figure archetypally speaking. He’s a provocateur and a comedian. The funny thing about comedians is that they are like the jester in the king’s court. The jester was the only person who could tell the truth because he was beneath contempt."

"The Q&A provided no opportunities for give and take, either. Questions were provided to a moderator on note cards. If anything challenging was handed in, it wasn’t read. [...] This was not a forum for debate."

"What they’ll find instead is demagoguery and Yiannopolous encouraging the audience to suppress dissent. When an attendee spoke out of turn to challenge him on the assertion that there is no gender pay gap, that person was ridiculed by Yiannopolous and then shouted down by the audience. Once that person was escorted out of the auditorium by security (the response to every disruption), Yiannopolous finally calmed the crowd. Then he asked, "Is anyone else here stupid enough to believe in the pay gap?", with the implication anyone answering in the affirmative would be subject to the same treatment."

"So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life"

"My basic gripe with Milo is that he strikes me as fairly insincere. I mean, he appears to be trolling all of humanity at this point and having a lot of fun doing it. And half of what he says about social justice warriors and political correctness and Islamophobia is very incisive and amusing. But he seems to approach everything as a performance, and this leads me wondering what he actually believes."

"His associates are the ascendant racist and neo-fascist movements of our time. He was a means to repackage their hatred for a certain demographic: as edgy, trendy, cool. Performative fascism, if you like. That’s why they call themselves the "alt-right", after all: allowing them to cloak themselves not as a renaissance of fascist movements that have produced only human carnage in their previous incarnations, but as a sexy in-group and subculture that all the new cool kids are part of."

"This monster right here that you're so afraid of, the face you in your nightmares, was created by social justice warrior assholes like you! Now you have this wonderful faggot, that's what happens."

"When his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally "do the right thing" and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online. Let me assure you, as someone who endured a bit of that harassment, it is breathtaking in its scope, intensity, and cruelty but hey, we must protect the freedom of speech. Certainly, Simon & Schuster was not alone in what they were willing to tolerate. A great many people were perfectly comfortable with the targets of Milo's hateful attention until that attention hit too close to home."

"At every turn, the right has lauded him as a free-speech hero, while disregarding his attacks on the most vulnerable of targets. Yiannopoulos invaded Leslie Jones' mentions to shut her down, lob misogynist insults and invite his followers to do the same. He has suggested that women should stop "screwing up the internet for men," and instead of speaking out about online harassment, "just log off." He endlessly fetishizes black men, reducing them to hypersexualized stereotypes, then doubles down with yet more stereotypes. "I lift young black men out of poverty every day." Yiannopoulos, proud troll by trade, wrote in one Facebook post last year. "Sure, the next morning my driver takes them right back there but whatever." Apparently, the only way conservatives can think of to assert their free speech rights is by dehumanizing people based on race and gender identity."

"His enablers deserve only contempt. It doesn’t matter whether they agree with his bigotry, because they almost certainly do not. But they are fine with it – more than fine, in fact, because it is lucrative. [...] He was "controversial", they would say with a glint in their eye. "Provocative", even. And then the very media outlets that facilitated his rise would provide a platform for chin-strokers to sagely ask: "Why is this phenomenon on the rise and who is to blame?""

"Every time you write one of your commentaries it gets 10,000 comments. It goes even broader than the Breitbart audience, all over. Steven Bannon to Milo Yiannopoulos"

"I’ve finally been persuaded out of retirement. But my skills are a bit rusty, so the best role I could land was an unpaid internship with a friend. Pray for me!"

"You want the truth, Milo? You are a hurt 13-year-old boy. I don't know what pain you had to go through to make you so cold and distant from any feelings of compassion and basic kindness, but causing hurt makes you into the monster you are running from."

"I wanted to show Trump the kind of talent that he’s missing out on by allowing his terrible handlers to dictate who he can and can’t hang out with. I also wanted to send a message to Trump that he has systematically repeatedly neglected, ignored, abused the people who love him the most, the people who put him in office, and that kind of behavior comes back to bite you in the end."

"When I used to kid that I only became gay to torment my mother, I wasn’t entirely joking. Of course, I was never wholly at home in the gay lifestyle — Who is? Who could be? — and only leaned heavily into it in public because it drove liberals crazy to see a handsome, charismatic, intelligent gay man riotously celebrating conservative principles. That’s not to say I didn’t throw myself enthusiastically into degeneracy of all kinds in my private life. I suppose I felt that’s all I deserved. I’d love to say it was all an act, and I’ve been straight this whole time, but even I don’t have that kind of commitment to performance art. Talk about method acting."

"Milo's fan club avoids honest debate and truthful argument like the plague. It's a trick. They bite every hand that reaches out to them and then play the victim when one comes back as a fist in their face. You can't shove fingers into your ears and scream “la la la, I am not listening” like children when anyone attempts to speak with you and then turn around and ask for respectful discourse when we get tired of your bullshit."

"The lesson of this whole disgusting debacle seems to be that for half this country to hit rock bottom, they have to dig past racism, xenophobia, misogyny and religious hatred, and then keep right on digging until they hit pedophilia. It's not surprising that a segment which believes boasting about pussy grabbing is no biggie would be fine with any horrific thing Yiannopoulos said as long as he kept it to those it resents—the non-white, non-Christian and non-male—for demanding equal treatment, an idea it disparages as "political correctness.""

"You remind me of a young, gay, alive Christopher Hitchens."

"If Glasgow students want to break away from the snowflake stereotype - and I hope they do - then I'll gladly represent them, and push back against any member of the administration that tries to impose a culture of trigger warnings and safe spaces. My election would be a clear signal that, in Glasgow at least, this culture is coming to an end and that people come to university to be challenged and to grow."

"I would say, that situation I am describing on Joe Rogan show I was very definitely a predator on both occasions. As offensive as some people would find that I don’t much care. That was certainly my experience. The law is probably about right, that’s probably roughly the right age. I think it’s probably about okay, but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them. You’re misunderstanding what pedophilia means. Pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13-years-old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty. Pedophilia is attraction to people who don’t have functioning sex organs yet. Who have not gone through puberty. Some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming of age relationships, the relationships in which those older men help those young boys to discover who they are, and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable and sort of a rock where they can’t speak to their parents. You don’t understand what pedophilia is if you are saying I’m defending it because I’m certainly not."