Frequent VDare contributor John Zmirak has co-authored a book which may be of interest to Vdare.com readers. The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living skewers Ted Kennedy (and his brother John, too), liberal churchmen, the French and Mexican Revolutions, multicultural celebrations of “diversity,” and the Mexican PRI—while offering zany stories of the saints, celebrations of the feasts and traditions which define Western civilization, and a spirited defense of the motivations behind the Crusades.

It also includes 58 gourmet recipes by a 3-star chef, and dozens of ideas for parties, ranging from a NASA-themed event to celebrate “the Vatican Space Program” (the Assumption of Mary) to a “Seven Deadly Sins” party for Halloween. On a more serious note, the book explores the varied Catholic responses to the American founding, and the reasons why so many Catholics don’t identify with the American nation. Available now in paperback from Amazon.com (though Amazon still lists it as not yet published).

The election of the great Bavarian intellectual Josef Ratzinger, picked as a dark horse by Roger McCaffrey in an earlier VDARE.COM blog item, is very good news indeed for those who treasure the heritage of the West. As a good American Europhile, I celebrated the news by belting out an old patriotic German Catholic song. Some conservative Catholics—okay, me—had hoped for the election of the Nigerian Cardinal Arinze, who is equally orthodox. I thought the fact that he is black and from the developing world would have flummoxed and silenced liberal critics for at least five years, giving him time to enact needed reforms in the Church.

Ratzinger has been treated as a virtual piñata for decades by the secular and liberal Catholic press, pictured as the evil genius responsible for the “conservatism” of Pope John Paul II on moral and theological issues. Journalists just couldn’t shoehorn into their minds the fact that the grinning Polish pope of whom everyone is so fond REALLY believed all the hoary doctrines they deplored.

But most importantly for readers of VDARE.COM, Ratzinger was the loudest voice at the Vatican saying “non possumus” to the entry of Turkey into the European Union—an act which, as I’ve written here before, would throw open the gates of Christendom’s cradle to massive Islamic immigration, extending the already porous border of Europe to the frontiers of Iraq and Iran.

By permitting such a man to become pope, rather than a Third World cardinal, however holy, I feel that God is offering Europe and the West one more chance to wake up and repent. The saints who died to evangelize Europe are still interceding for our old mother continent—as well as for Mother Church.