From the November issue: A few weeks ago, an image went viral. In Belgium a migrant used the eternal flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to cook an omelette. For many, the desecration brought to mind a quote from French author Jean Raspail: “Your universe has no meaning to them. They will not try to understand. They will be tired, they will be cold, they will make a fire with your beautiful oak door.”

After decades out of print, Raspail’s Camp of the Saints was acquired by Vauban Books and re-published in September. To mark the new edition, Matthew Schmitz writes perceptively on the man behind the novel.

For further reading: The new edition’s forward is adapted from an essay in the May 2023 issue of First Things, by Nathan Pinkoski, who wrote about “the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West.” It’s a sobering piece (“Spiritual Death of the West”).

Ireland has a new, lefty president writes John Duggan. But her apparent landslide is not all that it seems. Unhappy voters (A) didn’t show up to the polls, (B) voted in protest for a candidate who had dropped out, or (C) spoiled their ballots by writing in a non-candidate. Some Irish voters defaced their ballots to protest the rape of a young girl by a migrant, writing “She was only ten.” Overall, 13 percent of ballots were spoiled and only a small minority of the Irish voted for Catherine Connolly.

Also relevant: Duggan mentions that a number of voters wrote in Maria Steen, a non-candidate. He wrote in March 2024 about her successful campaign to keep the word mother in the Irish constitution: “Ireland Tries and Fails to Erase Mothers.”

Long-time columnist George Weigel argues that the sixtieth anniversary (yesterday) of Nostra Aetate couldn’t have come at a better time. The Vatican II document laid out the Church’s relationship to non-Christians, especially Jews. And, written in the long shadow of the Holocaust, it was historically conciliatory.

Weigel writes that, given recent expressions of anti-Semitism, the anniversary is a welcome reminder that “Jew-hatred is Christ-hatred. . . . Jesus of Nazareth makes no sense without understanding him as he understood himself: as a son of God’s covenant with the Jewish people who, from the Cross, evoked Psalm 22 and its triumphant claim that ‘dominion belongs to the Lord’ who ‘rules over the nations’ and to whom ‘all the proud of the earth bow down.’”

More recommendations: Along with George Weigel, First Things is blessed with a number of eminent commentators on the Second Vatican Council. For Thomas Joseph White’s fascinating description of the Nietzschean hermeneutic common among progressives, read “The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II” (November 2012). For a robust case for Saint Thomas Aquinas’s influence on conciliar documents, read Thomas Guarino’s “Aquinas at the Council” (2022).

Until next time.
 

 

JACOB AKEY

Associate Editor