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So on CNN, Kevin Costner admitted to having used the N word. Many times. So what? Does that make him a racist? I talked about it on this week's radio show, including MY experience with having used and heard the word. Watch for yourself and decide on whether the context matters in this instance.

Alabama's first openly gay state lawmaker threatened to "out" fellow elected officials engaged in extramarital affairs, especially those that champion family values and traditional marriage. State Rep. Patricia Todd's (D-Birmingham) ire came to a boil after several state officials reacted negatively to a recent federal ruling that declared Alabama's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard called the ruling "outrageous" and said that the will of 80% of Alabama citizens who voted in 2006 to define marriage as between a man and a woman has been overturned by the act of "a single unelected and unaccountable federal...

This may seem to be a rather obscure topic, but it popped up while I was reading Helen Smith’s musings on whether or not pornography should be made illegal and the long term, detrimental effects that it can have on marriage. As a subset of that discussion, she touched on David Friedman’s book, Law’s Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters. In it, Friedman makes the following observation on prostitution in general and the specific side effects it can have when married men pay for sex outside of marriage. (I specify “men” here only because...

I have been assured, over and over again, sometimes condescendingly and sometimes not, that the Kasper Proposal is a dead letter. First it was Cardinal Muller's letter in L'Osservatore Romano. Then it was some random papal comment affirming marital indissolubility (which ignored the fact Cardinal Kasper swearsies he's all about keeping marriages intact). Then, most recently, it was the supposed door-slamming vote at the end of the Synod, which asserted that the matter was--this time for sure, how could you ever doubt it?--done. Over. Locked into a safe, wrapped in chains and dumped square in into Challenger Deep, where it...

Evidence of this was already apparent in October of 2013, when Neo-Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin repeatedly referred to the Church’s perennial moral teaching prohibiting the reception of Communion in a state of mortal sin merely a changeable “discipline” or “practice.” Then in April 2014, Akin again referred to this teaching as a “practice” in his frantic defense of Francis informing a woman living in adultery that she could receive Holy Communion. Fast forward to October 2014. In the chaos immediately following the synod, Neo-Catholic apologist Jeff Mirus left no doubt about his willingness to go theological cliff diving in an...

Washington D.C., Nov 6, 2014 / 08:41 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In the wake of an intense Synod on the Family, a leading voice supporting admission to Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics said different sides on Church debates should not use Pope Francis' words to bolster their own agenda. Speaking at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 6, Cardinal Walter Kasper aimed to explain Pope Francis and his pontificate. The emeritus president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity spoke as the recipient of the 2014 Johannes Quasten Award. In attempting to understand the Pope,...

The recent Synod on the Family, part one, created confusion among many people from the moment it was announced. In addition, not everyone knew that “the Extraordinary General Assembly would be followed by an Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in October 2015, on the same topics.” The events this past October were nothing more than round one on Catholic doctrine, pastoral leadership, and subjects related to the family. But what also became clear is that some of the topics addressed by the bishops at the synod are more than a little contentious. Among these are the questions...

According to the Archbishop of Washington, the recent Synod on the Family worked to address the challenge that many young people today don’t fully understand the nature of marriage. “There were a good number of us within the synod who felt, given the heavily secular climate today in which so many of our young people are living – what they see in media, television, electronic print, in movies, the music they listen to, the world they’re engaged in – (that) the idea of a permanent, enduring bond that would be life-giving and at the same time be indissoluble is not...

ST. PETERSBURG — For more than a year, Susan Portal and her husband, Paul, attended Sunday Mass, but were not allowed to receive communion, the central sacrament of the Catholic Church. The couple had been waiting for his marriage to be annulled by a church tribunal and they married in a civil ceremony so they could bring his son, Luke, then 9, into their home. But marrying outside the church after a divorce barred them from the sacrament. "It was hard," she recalled. "That is such an important part of the Mass for us and here we had a son...

Like antifreeze that drips from a car and poisons cats, the statements exuded by the Vatican Synod on the Family are sweet. It is tempting to lap them up, to welcome the Church’s new proposed stance of apologizing to sinners and obscuring the nature of sin. There is no other way to describe the moral revolution proposed in the Synod’s preliminary report, which was produced by the bishops whom Pope Francis handpicked to manage the meeting. Rather than speaking prophetically in defense of the uniqueness and holiness of marriage, the task of Christians today includes “recognizing positive elements” in “imperfect”...

Denounce the Synod PopeSynodFamily1 Today, the first official document of the Extraordinary Synod on the Family was released. Suffice it to say that the document doesn’t even bother in the least to present Catholic teaching on the family. The whole document is an exercise in modernist tactics of persuasion by means of doctrinal ambiguity and unsettling that which is settled. But the most sinister passages depart clearly from the Catholic Faith. First, the document opens the door explicitly to holy communion for those who are publicly living in objectively adulterous unions: 46. In the same way the situation of the...

Two more cardinals and an archbishop have offered their agreement with the German Cardinal Walter Kasper that the Church should offer Holy Communion to Catholics in “irregular” marital situations. U.S. Vaticanist John Allen, writing on Crux, quoted Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, the office that interprets Church law, saying that in cases of “urgency and necessity” Catholics who have divorced and civilly remarried, should be readmitted to Communion. Coccopalmerio gave the “hard case” example of a woman civilly married to a man who had been abandoned by his wife and who cares...

We got this letter some hours ago, and asked this reader in Africa for his permission to post it. He just asked to have any information that could identify him or the diocese removed. Dear friends of rorate-caeli.blogspot.com, I live in the diocese of [omitted] in [a small country in East Africa], a diocese that's very full of life, marriages, baptisms, confirmations, vocations are so abundant that they would seem improbable elsewhere. Since I lived for many years in Belgium and in Ireland years ago, I know what I'm talking about. Our bishop, [name omitted], though not at all old,...

 I'm a Catholic who is doing some print layout work for my friend who is faithful at the World Assemblies of God. We are each convinced that Jesus Christ has given us Faith in our own particular creed. I don't know if I can speak exactly for my World Assemblies of God friend—I assume he is like me in this—but if I were convinced that the World Assemblies of God presented the fullness of Jesus Christ's Truth—which is Himself—I would go there. However, I'm convinced that the Catholic Church presents the fullness of Truth, as my friend is convinced that World Assemblies of...

Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich said a strong majority of German bishops supported Cardinal Walter Kasper’s proposal to find a way to allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion, and that he intended to raise the issue at the Synod of Bishops. Speaking at the close of the synod’s first day, Cardinal Marx also said it was crucial for the synod’s debate on family issues to be an “open discussion” that extends beyond the synod hall and involves the wider society. Marx, who is president of the German bishops’ conference, made his remarks in a meeting with journalists. Synod...

Traditionally, social conservatism has enjoyed the support of Catholicism, whose body of teaching on morals is a mother lode of ideas and arguments that retain much of their force even apart from their theological context. Rumors that the Church is poised to relax its position on the indissolubility of marriage are therefore troubling or encouraging, depending on which side you stand in the culture war. Tomorrow, a synod of bishops will convene in Rome to discuss the family. It’s a big topic, but what has developed as the headline item on the agenda is a question that on its face...

Full Title: The Synod Will Be a Farce - if the Kasper Legion's Attempt to Muzzle It Goes According To Plan Q: Was Pope Paul VI wrong not to listen to the majority of lay couples on the commission discussing contraception back in the 1960s? A: I [Kasper] have a high esteem for Paul VI, he was a prophetic pope in a very difficult situation of the church after 1968 and so on. He was concerned to remain in the truth and not give up something, but I think it’s also a question of the interpretation of this encyclical Humanae...

“And I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery.” - Jesus (Matthew 19:9) “It’s now a new situation of a marriage. They are living together, they love each other, and to say every sexual act is sinful, that’s different. If you tell people who do it this way, and they do it in a responsible way, to tell them that’s adultery, permanent adultery, I think they would feel insulted and offended.” - Cardinal Walter...

Over the last few days, Cardinal Burke made a few noteworthy statements about the dust up around the Chair of Peter. Cardinal Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, said in a conference call with journalists on Tuesday that he found it “amazing” that Cardinal Kasper claimed to speak for the Pope. The Pope doesn’t have laryngitis. The Pope is not mute. He can speak for himself. If this is what he wants, he will say so,” Cardinal Burke said. “But for me as a cardinal to say that what I am saying are the words of Pope Francis? That to...

A recent investigation has uncovered a shocking tale of corruption and adultery at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Susan Taylor, a longtime federal employee and Deputy Chief Procurement Officer at the Veterans Health Administration since 2010, not only used her position to award government contracts to a former business partner, and worked with said company to hide the thousands and thousands of dollars it was making off the government, but conspired with her married boyfriend — who also had close personal ties to the company — to thwart investigations into her misconduct. The salacious story began in 1994, when Taylor...