“We need …to speak frankly with each other when our freedoms are threatened. Now is such a time. As Catholic bishops and American citizens, we address an urgent summons to our fellow Catholics and fellow Americans to be on guard, for religious liberty is under attack, both at home and abroad.”[1] One is compelled to … Read more
In this third and final part of my series I will: (1) comment on the relation between the Supreme Court ruling and the HHS Mandate; (2) outline a set of reasons given by Cardinal Dolan for which the Bishops are reticent to speak on contraception, and offer a comment to each; and (3) offer some … Read more
“We’ve grown hoarse saying this is not about contraception, this is about religious freedom,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan has repeatedly insisted, regarding the lawsuits opposing the HHS Obamacare Mandate. I beg to differ. On both prudential and metaphysical grounds, it is about contraception. On the practical level, in politics, as Grover Norquist reminds us, you don’t … Read more
Last week I received a mailing from Caritas of Birmingham, in Sterret, Alabama. It was an invitation to come to the four-storey Tabernacle of our Lady’s Messages at Caritas, where a visionary, Marija Pavlovic Lunetti, is slated to receive five messages and apparitions during the 2012 gathering from July 1 to July 5. Caritas is … Read more
The Global Picture As we all know, there are forces at the highest level of global politics and industry working towards the goal of spreading “reproductive rights.” Back in 1995 in The Gospel of Life (pars. 16 – 17), Pope John Paul II described the situation like this: The Pharaoh of old, haunted by the … Read more
Envy is one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. It is certainly the most joyless of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was envy of God that caused the fall of the angels and the devils come into existence. It was envy that brought on the fall of our first parents. The devil envied their happiness, … Read more
Editor’s note: This is the first of a three part article that will discuss the current approach of the US Bishops in order to thank them and praise their efforts, while at the same time pointing out a certain oversight in their approach. Following parts will look at the reasons not often mentioned for which the … Read more
It seems to be in vogue to write about one’s alma mater these days. CatholicVote.org blogger Lauren Hoedeman recently defended the University of Notre Dame by calling on those who discount the school’s Catholicity to reconsider their assertions. In a similar fashion, First Things junior fellow and Georgetown University alum Matthew Cantirino lamented that even though he was proud to attend … Read more
The HHS mandate illustrates three liberal ideological commitments that treat religious freedom as an afterthought. What do the University of Notre Dame, EWTN, and the Archdiocese of New York have in common? More than you probably think. Each is a Catholic institution, of course. Each is also suing the Obama Administration over the HHS “contraception” … Read more
In the coming months we will learn whether America’s long experiment in ordered liberty must finally be declared dead. It has of late been coughing up plenty of blood. Consider the public school system: nor forget that what is implied by the word “system” is a vast coordinated network of elementary and secondary schools nearly identical … Read more
I must confess—with no sense of boasting, just honesty—that I have often been quietly dismissive of news of, or interest in, the world of the more spectacular aspects of the faith: news of this incorruptible holy one’s body or that purported apparition; this stigmatic, or that saint’s levitations. And while such subtle, occasional arrogance is … Read more
That the film about the Cristero Rebellion, For Greater Glory, has been news to many highlights the appalling ignorance of history in our culture. That isolation from the human experience has made it easy to confuse conscience with emotion and think religion is irrational. George Neumayer has written, “In one of his memoirs, Obama uses … Read more
Several months ago, I came across a two-volume history of the Church in the United States that I’d never read before: Theodore Maynard’s The Story of American Catholicism, first published in 1941. Maynard was not a professional historian and his telling of the American Catholic story has a bit more of the apologetic edginess of … Read more
The Dalai Lama has been awarded this year’s Templeton Prize, an annual honor given by the Templeton Foundation to a figure who, according to the foundation’s website, “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” In practice, the Prize has gone frequently to thinkers who have investigated the interaction between science and religion. … Read more
A visitor recently remarked that, while waiting outside my door, he noticed that among the many people walking along Park Avenue, most grey-haired people were talking to each other, while almost everyone younger was absorbed in their iPods and their cell phones. You could say that they were conversing as well, but they were in … Read more
Out of Egypt I called My son – Hosea 11:1 In the Gospel of Matthew, the advent of the Messiah is followed by an abrupt departure. Almost immediately after the Magi visit them, the Holy Family takes off for Egypt, Joseph having been warned in a dream that King Herod would kill his Son. The … Read more
Professor Mark Bauerlein has recently argued in Public Discourse that liberalism, or the moral and epistemological relativism it engenders, starves literature of the narratives that alone can provide a work with meaning. Indeed it suggests that meaning itself is an illusion; and, once that is said, art disappears, and only the wraith of escapism, or … Read more
When St. Paul said in Ephesians 6 that our struggle was not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, he was not kidding. What we might add today is that the principalities and powers have shrewdly made sure that the struggle is precisely over our “flesh and blood,” over the very meaning of … Read more
Various Scriptural passages indicate that Jesus, before his trial and execution, had hoped for a very different outcome of his sojourn on earth: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, … Read more
Since Vatican II, the Catholic Church has been turned upside down in the name of an ecumenical council whose true interpretation continues to be debated more than half a century after it closed. One point of contention is the Council’s teaching on religious liberty. In his 1864 encyclical Quanta Cura, Pope Pius IX labeled as … Read more