The year 2018 will mark the 50th, or Golden, anniversary of Humanae Vitae (HV), in which Paul VI restated what had been, until 1930, an unbroken and universal Christian teaching. Today, on HV’s 44th anniversary, the Bellarmine Forum is launching The Campaign for Humanae Vitae. Our goal is to gather a million signatures on our … Read more
A weekend has passed since twelve people were killed and fifty-eight were wounded in Aurora, Colorado, by alleged gunman James Holmes. Throughout the period I searched the mainstream media for statements from America’s religious leaders that might help people make sense of the tragedy. The closest I came to finding any pastoral contribution was in … Read more
Throughout the post-Vatican II years, the U.S. bishops’ conference has typically defended the welfare state and not infrequently urged its expansion. Everyone familiar with the situation knows that this has had far more to do with the political predilections of certain conference staff members than with the settled judgment of the American episcopate–or with a … Read more
The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims. The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed … Read more
By the last decade of the 11th century, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the formerly Christian world–Palestine, Egypt, Asia Minor—all now were under their control. And the Turks were pushing westward toward Constantinople, the center of Byzantine Christianity. The Byzantine emperor appealed to the pope in Rome for assistance; and it seemed clear that … Read more
The Boy Scouts are as American as apple pie, and they have decided to keep it that way. This has earned them the censure of the Washington Post’s editorial page last week. The Scouts decided to reaffirm the policy to deny “membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals or who engage in behavior … Read more
In the mid-1940s my father re-founded, with others, Troop 37 in a small South Carolina mill town. He resurrected what was clearly among the earliest local Boy Scout organizations in our country. In the mid-70s I re-chartered, with others, the same entity my father did a generation earlier. We both became Eagles, one of the … Read more
In the teeth of protests the Boy Scouts of America is sticking to a membership standards policy which excludes homosexual persons, both adult leaders and Scouts. That, according to media reports, is the meaning of a press release which mentions neither the word “homosexual/ity” nor “gay” and only once refers to “same-sex orientation”. Under pressure … Read more
With imaginative power and biting satire Swift exposes the madness and folly of learning divorced from morals and of reason devoid of feeling and charity—the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment. In “a Voyage to Lilliput” six-inch creatures, not only tiny in size but also petty and small-minded in thought, possess advanced knowledge of mathematics and … Read more
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Second Part of the Second Volume of his Summa theologiae, considers in a little over 1000 pages in Latin a massive number of sins and vices – injustice, gluttony, anger, greed, lying, etc., etc. Sexual sins are considered under the technical scholastic rubric of “luxury” (i.e., lust), and like the … Read more
After decades of strategically choosing to ignore the transgendered community, the GLB (Gay Lesbian and Bisexual) activists have added the T and in some case a Q to their coalition. T stands for transgendered, defined as anyone who wants to appear in public and be accepted as the sex they were not born, whether or … Read more
On July 3rd, just days after the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI would beatify the Sicilian anti-Mafia priest Don Pino Puglisi, it became clear not everyone was happy with the decision. Police discovered a bomb in the form of a gas cylinder outside the entrance of a Centre in Palermo founded by the late … Read more
“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” —Pope John Paul II The abortion issue is not simply a … Read more
Best-selling author and controversial social scientist Charles Murray is back in the news. This time it’s because of his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010. In “Coming Apart,” Murray deftly wields both statistical data and anecdotal evidence to document the wholesale abandonment of the ideals that for two centuries defined the … Read more
The characteristic of the modern age is that men concentrate on themselves and what they can and want to do. This and this alone is what life is about. No outside source can guide, command, or coerce us. Man is autonomous. He is only what he makes himself to be, whatever it is. He does … Read more
The Nuns on the Bus tour ended in front of the United Methodist Church & Society Building here in DC on July 2nd. Sister Simone Campbell gave an impassioned speech invoking Catholic Social Teaching in defense of their ideas about the federal budget and criticized certain Catholic politicians for violating the tenets of Catholic Social … Read more
The Supreme Court’s minor mistakes have few systemic consequences. But when the Supremes make a big mistake, the error tends to seep throughout the entire political process, poisoning everything in its path. That was what happened with the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which intensified the passions and accelerated the dynamics that led to the … Read more
Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, has long been a popular figure for political conservatives to cite. But his views on religion get relatively little attention. This is a shame, because Burke has a lot to offer those concerned about matters of religion, morality, and politics in contemporary American life.
The last two weeks have brought good news for proponents of abstaining from sex until marriage. Two Fridays ago, for example, the House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee released a report which said abstinence-only education is superior to so-called “comprehensive sex education.” The subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over the nation’s federal sexual education policies, released … Read more
Now that the Affordable Care Act has survived its Supreme Court challenge, there comes the fight over its implementation. Moral considerations rank high on the list of casus belli for Catholics and other religious groups. They fear that the Act will force them to pay for procedures which they abhor, like the morning-after pill, abortion, … Read more