Alex > Recent Status Updates

I like the main character

Joe is a bastard. Screw that guy.

"But the porter abruptly abandoned LaFarge when an imposing German military officer demanded service first. “Half paralyzed with fear, the porter dropped my things on the sidewalk and lugged the big valises inside under an ever-pointing finger,” LaFarge remembered. It felt like an allegory for what was happening between the two countries [Germany and Czechia]."

"“There are two crosses now side by side in Rome . . . the cross of Christianity and the crooked cross of neo-paganism,” it said, without crediting Hurley as the author. Hurley’s anonymous words were translated and read on Vatican Radio in Italian, English, German, and French and published in Osservatore Romano."

Pope Pius XI had received the last rites four months before he published "Mit Brennender Sorge". Universally, he was seen as a man close to death.

"Masaryk also predicted that Hitler and Stalin would eventually join forces. As bad as Hitler and Nazism might be, Communism was seen as considerably worse by LaFarge, his fellow churchmen, and the Vatican. This was at the heart of the Catholic Church’s slow, cautious response to the dangers of Hitler and Mussolini."
The author points out that this was understandable.

"He walked on the slab that entombed Lieutenant General Henry Shrapnel, who gave his name to exploding cannon shells. Contrary to LaFarge’s assumption—“I suppose he exploded!”—Shrapnel died of natural causes in 1842 at the age of eighty, supported all the while by a comfortable government stipend for his invention."

The Archbishop of Vienna, Theodor Innitzer, congratulated Hitler on his annexation of Austria. Pope Pius XI berated him, but let himself get talked out of demanding that Archbishop Innitzer resign. Innitzer retracted his support for Hitler later, but there was no audience to receive the retraction because freedom of press was curtailed.

LaFarge was close with Martin Luther King Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt, two people I really dislike. I also dislike the writing style of this book.

"St. Benedict appeared once to St. Gertrude, saying, “Whosoever reminds me of the extraordinary prerogative with which the Lord deigned to glorify my death shall be assisted by me at his death, and I will be his faithful protector against the assaults of the wicked enemy. Fortified by my presence, he will escape the snares of the evil one and safely attain to eternal glory.”"

Too horny, too much blasphemy.