VERONA, ITALY — It’s unfortunate to be away from America on July 4 — but it was fortunate to be overseas at the close of Pride Month. What a respite it has been to be in Italy and, I imagine, almost any country other than our culturally corrupted New America, during the closing days of the new creed of the new faith: Pride.
Here in Italy, I’ve had a blessed break from American wokeness. No race wars, no BLM flags, no “LGBTQ2S+,” no drag queens at the local library or sporting events, no Pride Month run amok assaulting your nostrils with every noxious breath of the Kultursmog. (READ MORE: Pride Month? Take Pride in Your Traditional Family Values)
I can’t say that I saw no rainbow flags at all in Italia, but I certainly didn’t see them by the dozens or hundreds, as Americans see them in cities and especially in goofy university towns. A caller to the Drew Mariani Show last week told me that, during his entire time in Rome a couple of weeks ago, the only Pride flag he saw was the one posted outside Joe Biden’s U.S. embassy at the Vatican. The caller said it was terribly embarrassing for him as an American and especially as a Catholic. It conveys to Italians how perverse the America of Jefferson and Adams and Washington and Madison has become.
In Milan, I saw one Pride flag flying from what I believe was a hotel. Not coincidentally, I suppose, there was an ogre of a man across from the hotel wearing a wig and dress and attempting to sing music for the throng passing by from the glorious Milan Cathedral (the Duomo di Milano). The construction of that incredible edifice took nearly six centuries to complete, and no doubt its artists didn’t paint any frescoes with images like the bearded dude in high heels I saw strumming a guitar.
It was not exactly a Caravaggio.
I did see two rainbow flags in Milan that had the word “Pace” on them. Translation for young Americans raised in our government schools: That means “Peace.”
I was struck by that. You can’t call that rainbow flag a Pride flag. It was a Peace flag, I suppose. Was it even a “gay rights” flag? I can’t say. Maybe it was simply a flag of a rainbow. In better, saner days, before America’s modern cultural revolution, rainbows abounded on everything from T-shirts to umbrellas. A rainbow symbolized God’s hopeful promise to humanity before the “gay lobby” appropriated the Creator’s symbol for its sexual-ideological purposes.
If the “Pace” flag was a form of the “gay rights” flag, I at least extend some kudos to the messengers. It shows that Italians are more theologically sophisticated than our ignoramuses in America. Enough Italians have been imbued with enough religious upbringing — Catholicism still thoroughly pervades the culture — that they understand that pride isn’t something you celebrate as a month-long holiday or the signature message of your movement. Unlike our moral morons in the United States, Italians surely know that “pride cometh before the fall,” that it’s the first and worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, that it was the source of Satan’s rebellion, and that it is, well, not a virtue but a vice.
You don’t turn pride into the emblem of your cause unless you’re wildly ill-informed. Or worse.
Anyway, that was Milan, the largest city in northern Italy and a place of fashion and elite culture. If one expected to see a Pride flag anywhere in Italy — outside of the humiliating U.S. embassy — it might be in Milan. Once outside of Milan, I saw no such wokeness anywhere. Quite the contrary.
A touching testimony to that was our stop about an hour east of Milan in the 4th-century-B.C. city of Brescia in the Lombardy region.
The enduring symbol of Brescia is not a BLM banner or “trans rights” flag but the 15th-century church of Our Lady of Miracles. It was built in honor of an image of the Blessed Virgin and Christ Child that the locals believed had miraculously healed them and stopped a ghastly outburst of bubonic plague, which was in the process of killing just about everyone in the town. When the plague was unleashed in March 1478, the population in Brescia was roughly 40,000. By July of the next year, the devastation was horrific: Only about 4,000 people remained. Some 90 percent of the populace had perished. Think about that.
That image of Christ and his Blessed Mother was first displayed on a house in town. Many of those who gathered to it claimed they were miraculously healed. That is a claim, dear reader, that your humble columnist cannot confirm, but I’m certainly not one to deny the powers of Heaven, nor one to doubt the sufferings of a traumatized people desperately turning wherever they could to be saved. The community was so convinced of the powers of the image that authorities later constructed a magnificent church around it. The image is displayed to this day in the apse above the altar.
If we’re looking for symbols, well, that’s one that I can place my faith in. I’ll take that blessed image in Brescia over a Pride flag in America any day.
Pace, dear readers. Pace.
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Somewhere Over the Rainbow Flag Flies the Banner of Infinite Inclusion