Gerald Warner
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Writer, web designer, etc.; born in New York; educated in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa; now based in London. read more
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Beware disgruntled anthroposophists
Readers will be interested to learn that two friends of mine, Mr. Stephen Klimczuk and The Much Honoured The Laird Gerald Warner of Craiggenmaddie, have collaborated on a book that looks to be of great interest. Secret Places, Hidden Sanctuaries depicts in detail many of the world’s secret nooks and crannies, from mystical sites to enigmatic bolt-holes, debunking myths and positing plausible theories along the way.
After taking an enticing gander at the book’s table of contents, it’s worth popping over to “Curated Secrets”, the blog through which the book’s two authors correspond with one another. The blog already features a picture of the first Goetheanum, the original world center of Rudolf Steiner’s movement that was burnt down by a disgruntled anthroposophist on New Year’s Eve 1922.
An Imperial Birthday
Gerald Warner has a splendid post over on his Daily Telegraph blog on Crown Prince Otto’s ninety-sixth birthday. Heavens! how time flies. It seemed like only yesterday was his ninety-fifth.
My favorite scene that Gerald mentions is this one:
Bravo, Budapest. And Hoch Habsburg!
‘Feudal pomp and Latin Mass at funeral of a Scottish laird’
Gerald Warner reports on the funeral of David Lumsden of Cushnie:
Thursday, September 11, 2008
To Edinburgh yesterday, for a melancholy but magnificent and uplifting occasion: the funeral of David Lumsden of Cushnie, Garioch Pursuivant of Arms, restorer of ancient castles and Jacobite romantic. It was held in the Catholic cathedral where, for the first time since Vatican II, the Latin Tridentine Mass was sung, thanks to the permissive rules of Benedict XVI in his motuproprio Summorum Pontificum.
The coffin was draped in the banners of the Order of Malta and the deceased’s arms, with an heraldic hatchment and the decorations of the orders of chivalry to which he belonged. Knights of Malta and of the Constantinian Order processed behind their banner in mediaeval robes. The congregation was filled with peers, chieftains, lairds and splendid eccentrics, the pews awash with tartan. One of the tail-coated ushers was the grandson of a papal marquis. Robin Angus, whose day job is venture capitalist, dressed in the uniform of a papal Knight of St Sylvester, delivered a moving panegyric.
This occasion was a potent reminder of an alternative Scotland, a different pulse from the vulgar, mean-minded, politically correct clones in the abysmal Scottish parliament at Holyrood. It was shamelessly feudal, aristocratic and colourful. Evelyn Waugh would have loved it; Harriet Harridan would have burst her stays. It was reminiscent of the scene in Waugh’s Sword of Honour when, at the funeral of old Mr Crouchback, the members of ancient Catholic Recusant families murmur their sonorous names while the narrator, parodying a wartime poster, concludes: “Their journey was really necessary.”
At the subsequent reception, Lady Mar, whose personal herald David was and who came top of the ballot for the 92 surviving hereditary peers in the House of Lords, was pointedly addressed by Jacobites as “Your Grace”. This was because, although the British state recognises her as 30th Countess of Mar, her ancestor who led the Jacobite Rising of 1715 was created Duke of Mar by the exiled Stuart King James VIII.
Only a few of these Jacobite peerages created by the Stuarts in exile have heirs today. Now that such hereditary peerages no longer bestow an automatic seat in Parliament, it would be a gracious gesture for the Crown to recognise them and so heal old historical wounds. There is a precedent: Spain has recognised the titles of nobility created by the Carlist claimants in exile – Carlism being the Spanish equivalent of Jacobitism.
The dry-as-dust forms issued by government departments are normally very boring; but the most romantic document available online is issued by the Spanish Ministry of Justice, entitled Solicitud de Titulo Nobiliario por: Rehabilitacion/Reconocimiento de Titulo Carlista. It is the formal application for recognition of a title of nobility conferred by the Carlist kings in exile from 1833 to 1936. David Lumsden of Cushnie (RIP) would have appreciated it.
Return of the Warner!
Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie, one of Britain’s greatest living journalists, now has a splendid blog over at the Daily Telegraph called Is It Just Me? I am sure you will all want to take a look at it. Already he has an appreciation of the recently deceased Franz Künstler, until his death the last living soldier of the Hapsburg army, a brief missive pointing out how terribly un-British the idea of a “Britishness Day” is, and a forthright post on the value of the stiff upper lip in times of crisis.
Much of what Gerald says is, to sensible people, simply obvious. But one of the great dangers of our modern age is that what ought to be simply obvious is becoming less and less so due to deliberate obfuscation by the political and media classes. Gerald’s talent is that he tells you what’s what and that he manages to do it with a graceful alacrity, and often wit, that are a welcome — and, sadly, rare — treat. Go, read, enjoy!
Warneriana: Gerald Warner Axed | ‘The Mass of All Time answers that need’ | Martyrs of Spain, Pray for Us! | Warner on the Gotha
Gerald Warner Axed
Scotland’s Voice of Reason Silenced
I WAS MUCH disheartened when I was told that Gerald Warner’s weekly column in Scotland on Sunday has been axed. Gerald’s writing is a refreshing Caledonian tonic in contrast to the usual second-rate rants from second-rate minds the exemplifies most newspaper columns today. Gerald Warner refuses to allow the heresiarchs of our age to lay waste to our civilization unchallenged. He is (err… was) the only substantial reason for paying for a copy of Scotland on Sunday. Of course, S-o-S is not available here in New York, so every Saturday night I would wait until after midnight GMT (7:00pm New York time) to read Gerald’s column online. Often enough, I would dutifully tell all the folks on the sidewalk after Mass on Sunday that they had to read Gerald’s column this week. Sometimes I’d even print the damn thing out and read it aloud for the enjoyment of all. But alas! No more…
Some Gerald Warner highlights on this site:
• Martyrs of Spain, Pray for Us!
• The Knights of Malta Ball 2006
• Warner on the Gotha
‘The Mass of All Time answers that need.’
In his superb column in this week’s Scotland on Sunday, Gerald Warner responds to the Holy Father’s motu proprio.
The bishops of England and Wales tried furiously to prevent the liberalisation of access to the Traditional Mass, lobbying the Vatican against it, although they had recently approved the regular celebration of a Mass for homosexuals. On the eve of the publication of the Papal document, Bishop Kieran Conry, of Arundel and Brighton, said: “Any liberalisation of the use of the rite may prove seriously divisive. It could encourage those who want to turn the clock back throughout the Church.” So, a liberal opposes liberalisation – why are we not surprised?
As for turning the clock back throughout the Church, it is the only possible remedy for the crisis that has afflicted it since the Second Vatican Catastrophe. The Novus Ordo (New Order of Mass) was invented by Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, assisted by six Protestant pastors, after the Vatican Council. When this appalling confection was presented to the 1967 Synod of Bishops it was indignantly rejected. Yet two years later it was universally imposed. Bugnini described it in 1974 as “a major conquest of the Catholic Church”.
Strange language from a Catholic bishop; but there were stranger things to come. In July, 1975 Bugnini was abruptly sacked after Pope Paul VI was shown evidence he was a Freemason. Bugnini denied the fact, but when the register of Italian Freemasonry came to light in 1976, it recorded Bugnini as having been initiated on April 23, 1963, with the esoteric code name ‘Buan’. So, even during the Vatican Council, Bugnini was already under automatic excommunication for Masonic membership. What possessed Paul VI to sack the author of the New Mass, but retain his liturgy for universal use? At least this episode throws light on the handshake at the ‘kiss of peace’ in the new rite. […]
For 40 years frenzied efforts have been made to stamp out the Traditional Mass and yet it has flourished. It is now past the point where there is the remotest prospect of extinguishing it. As Pope Benedict said in his explanatory letter accompanying the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (“Of Supreme Pontiffs”), one of his reasons for freeing the Old Mass was the number of young people now flocking to it.
That is what the faded 1960s trendies who are now bishops and seminary rectors fear: the impossibility of maintaining a revolution that has burned itself out. The Second Vatican Council means as little to today’s youth as the Council of Chalcedon. Its elderly adherents are like dads dancing at the school disco. Many young people are seeking the mystical and the numinous. The Mass of All Time answers that need.
Within the past month the Vatican has issued two other documents: one restoring the requirement for a two-thirds majority at Papal conclaves, which rules out the future election of an extreme radical; and a reassertion of the doctrine that the Protestant sects cannot be recognised as ‘churches’. It will not damage ecumenism, because that died long ago. Its premise was that Rome must endlessly divest, while Canterbury ordained priestesses and moved ever further from Catholicism. [Ed.: bold mine.] When you see a Church of Scotland congregation praying the rosary you may believe ecumenism is a two-way process.
‘The Mass of All Time will outlive the Sixties revolutionaries‘, by Gerald Warner; Scotland on Sunday, 15 July 2007.
Previously: Martyrs of Spain, Pray for Us! | Warner on the Gotha
A matter of degrees
Gerald Warner wrote a recent Scotland on Sunday column on the occasion of Edinburgh University revoking the honorary degree bestowed upon Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
He discussed various honorary degrees which had been bestowed upon monsters, tyrants, and evil men, and finished his column with a case from Spain.
The most morally grotesque academic elevation was perpetrated in Spain, in 2005, when the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid conferred a doctorate honoris causa on Santiago Carrillo, former leader of the Spanish Communist Party.
As chief of police in Madrid in 1936, he had presided over Cheka death squads that murdered huge numbers of people (2,800 in one weekend) for the crime of being ‘bourgeois’.
Throughout the squalid degree ceremony, people concerned with the honour of Spanish academe punctuated the proceedings with shouts of “Murderer!”
The most effective denunciation of this naked emperor, however, had been made during his journey back from exile. As the aircraft approached Madrid, with the arrogance of a reinstated member of the nomenklatura, he told the stewardess to ask the captain if he could enter the cockpit to get a better view of the capital.
Moments later the public address system came to life: “This is your captain speaking. In 15 minutes we shall be landing at Madrid Barajas airport. Before that, I would like you to see the historic site of Paracuellos de Jarama to the right of us. That was where thousands of innocent people were executed during our civil war. The man responsible for those executions is one of your fellow passengers, Don Santiago Carrillo Solares. He is sitting in seat 27-B.”
“That pilot,” Gerald writes, “deserved an honorary degree”.
Warner on the Gotha
Whilst rummaging through my room at home in New York last week, I came across this article which I had cut out of the ill-fated European in 1998 written by none other than Mr. Gerald Warner, KM. I was fourteen years old in 1998 and the European folded about a year later. Click here to read in jpg form. (A large file, some browsers may require resizing to view the text at a readable size).
Tip-Top Warner
Gerald Warner in this week’s Scotland on Sunday: priceless.
Some choice bits:
The whole notion, of course, was risible in the eyes of the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic. That people in the 21st century (“in this day and age”, as liberalism’s most brain-dead cliché phrases it) would come out and vote on abortion, stem-cell research and homosexual ‘marriage’, instead of addressing such important issues as medical welfare, gender equality and closer engagement with Europe had the liberal élite rolling in the aisles. They are not laughing now. …
As their television screens relayed pictures of unprecedented queues snaking for several blocks around polling stations, the élite leaped to the egotistic, patronising conclusion that the common people had come swarming out, like extras in an Eisenstein film, to implement the revolution that their betters had devised for them. …
That crass delusion epitomised the fissiparous detachment of the liberal subculture from the real America: those lines of voters were not The People – just people, the mainstream Americans with whom the Democrats are now hopelessly out of touch. They were mostly Christians; but they were not, for the most part, bible-thumping disciples of white-suited tele-evangelists – at least not in the states that crucially mattered. They were ordinary, church-going husbands and wives, mild in their manner but firm in their convictions. …
Liberals’ inexplicable fixation with the militant homosexual cause (representative of less than 3% of the population) proved self-destructive. In the past month, that lobby has destabilised such widely disparate institutions as the Anglican Church, the European Commission and, now, the Democratic Party. With all 11 states where referenda were held on same-sex marriage rejecting the proposition by majorities that had to be weighed rather than counted, the constitutional amendment that will finally resolve this issue is in the bag.
How quaint, thought European and New York liberals, that voters should be concerned that one in four Americans is aborted in the womb, when they could be supporting measures that would put an extra $500 in their pockets. How ignorant to oppose stem-cell research that will save so many lives. Who got their priorities right? Are the Americans not more thoughtful, more moral and more intelligent to worry about mass extermination of babies? …
“Dude, here’s our country!” That is what real Americans told Michael Moore, the hygienically challenged human hamburger whose Pravda-style propaganda has earned him more fans in Cannes than in all 50 states of the Union. Now he wants Hillary Clinton to challenge for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Great idea: an East Coast, liberal, feminist überbitch that might have been computer-realised by Karl Rove, to leave the Democrats with just California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Bring her on!
And in response to Mrs. Kerry’s “shove it”:
The whole thing has a feel of – in the parlance of our generation – “Ohhhh snap! He went there”. Monoculus floreat!
Read the whole thing, if you dare.
John Kerry, Lizard Freak
Mr. Gerald Warner, SMOM, our favourite knight in newsprint armor, on Senator Kerry:
From July 4’s Scotland on Sunday.
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