Free Republic

The Left opposes the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion provisions in healthcare reform. So why doesn't it oppose the YWCA, United Methodist Church, and the Central Conference of American Rabbis for favoring abortion? Getting Nancy Pelosi to accept a health care bill that bans federal funds for abortion was the greatest victory scored by U.S. bishops in a generation. It also unleashed an unprecedented attempt to censor them. Their latest enemy is Geoffrey Stone writing in the Huffington Post. Stone finds it troubling that the bishops are so vocal. He yearns for a time when JFK was president, a time...

As the African Synod opens its second week, by now the Aula's heard a word on seemingly everything thanks to the five-minute interventions from its 250-some bishop-members and non-bishop auditors, which comprise the first part of each global assembly. But even as the delegates have heard no shortage of strong comments calling for everything from debt forgiveness and inculturation to combatting corruption and advancing a greater role for women in the church, perhaps the most emotional and profound of the bunch came Friday, when the testimony of a Rwandan religious, Sister Genevieve Uwamariya, provided the monthlong gathering's most personal reflection...

Ten years ago, the subject of a news photograph - a 21-week-old fetus - reached his arm outside his mother's womb during prenatal surgery. A photographer captured the image of a tiny hand grasping the gloved hand of a surgeon. In the months that followed the publication of his photograph, Michael Clancy, a freelance photojournalist, found himself deeply committed to the fight to end abortion and having to choose a new career. For Clancy would end up in the middle of a heated political controversy and instead of reporting news, he suddenly became the news. On Sept. 18, Clancy shared...

FALL RIVER, MA, September 16, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Father Roger J. Landry, editor at The Anchor, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River (the diocese where the late Senator Edward Kennedy resided), has written extensively on the passing of Senator Kennedy and his funeral. Fr. Landry himself was ordained by Cardinal Sean O'Malley, the presider at Kennedy's funeral. In his latest column, to be published in the September 18 edition of The Anchor, Fr. Landry writes that the funeral with all of its extravagances created a "controversy that was totally avoidable." "The overall tone of the funeral liturgy...

Our democratic rule is based on theoretic relativism. Truth or order is its principal antagonist. If we admit truth, we deny liberty. The resultant moral chaos is acknowledged. But we do not address the cause and the consequences remain. They require a new politics of “care” for the whole society. But this “care” cannot be personal. It is non-preferential, egalitarian, same-for-all. Government is its best administrator. If people do whatever they want, they often must be “taken care of.” They are primarily victims of themselves and of old “structures.” They need someone to do for them what they cannot do...

The Catholic Church in America suffered another grave scandal this weekend. As was the case in the priestly abuse crisis, it was centered in Boston. If you are a Catholic and did not feel distressed and scandalized watching Senator Kennedy’s funeral at Mother of Perpetual Help Church in Boston Saturday, I have to ask in all frankness: why not? The scandal has nothing to do with his personal sins. I hope he confessed them and was forgiven, as I hope myself to be forgiven. The Church is always generous to sinners who make even the slightest gesture of repentance. In...

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill....

Boone Pickens should be commended for his leadership on American energy security, and for bringing Ted Turner along on some sensible approaches to enhancing it. (See their article in today’s Wall Street Journal.) Specifically, it makes sense to tap the nation's vast on-shore and off-shore natural-gas reserves for the purpose of weaning our trucks and government and corporate fleets from petroleum — much of which is imported from places that exhibit a slavish devotion to sharia, Chavismo, or some other ideology seeking our destruction. If combined with the adoption of an Open Fuel Standard for automobiles sold in America —...

enedict XVI‘s Caritas in Veritate must be read in light of a debate going on in the Catholic Church for a century. It first arose in the mid-1800s with the social question, and new ideas like liberalism and socialism. Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s encyclical (1891), was considered the Catholic answer to these new challenges. But it was really the result of a wide debate between two different schools of Christian economists and sociologists. One taught that the social question required the primacy of the theological virtue of charity, the other the primacy of the moral virtue of justice. The primacy...

Swedish health authorities have ruled that gender-based abortion is not illegal according to current law and can not therefore be stopped, according to a report by Sveriges Television. Swedish surgeon forgets swabs in sewn up mum (10 May 09) Swedish gays made to wait for church wedding (3 May 09) May Day nuptials for same-sex couples (2 May 09) The Local reported in February that a woman from Eskilstuna in southern Sweden had twice had abortions after finding out the gender of the child. The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about...

But I would say to the students that rather than protest, why don't they work up an e-mail and Twitter and Facebook and telephone campaign and see how many right to life meetings they could organize across the country to coincide with the exact same time of President Obama's commencement speech. It would be a great sign of the country's interest if across America that day, millions of Americans took a few moments to consider the importance of protecting the unborn and to consider how wrong it was for President Obama to have favored infanticide when he was a state...

Commentary by Editor of Catholic Information Service for Africa NAIROBI, Kenya, MARCH 31, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Here is a commentary written my Henry Makori, the editor of the Catholic Information Service for Africa, on the media coverage of Benedict XVI's comments that condoms are not the solution for fighting AIDs. The editorial is titled: "Africa: Are World Media Fighting Pope Benedict XVI?" * * * A priest I spoke to last week was so incensed by the media's coverage of Pope Benedict XVI's comments on condoms he wished, jokingly though, that the Vatican would next time bar reporters of a certain...

Fasting reveals that Jesus requires us to combat and enables us to conquer the sinful desires and habits that continue to plague us. Fasting reveals that the Christian life is a life of charity. Many of the Church Fathers made this point by quoting Yahweh’s words in Isaiah 58: Is this not the fast which I choose, To loosen the bonds of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free And break every yoke? Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house; When...

The banks must be forced to disclose their "toxic" assets.... In effect, this function can be executed by the setting up of a "bad bank," as the Swedes did in the early 1990s. The bad bank clears the toxic assets off the books of banking systems by buying them at market prices and forcing write downs by the banks. A good bad bank forces banks to write down their bad assets and cleanse their balance sheets with those made insolvent being recapitalized, nationalized or liquidated by the state. But it is equally possible to use a bad bank to buy...

"Russia's government actions in Georgia constitute just one front of a comprehensive campaign to reassert Russian dominance in the region through both coercive and cooperative instruments... This campaign of asserting Russian hegemony in the region started well before the Russian intervention in Georgia and will continue well beyond. And it is more than coincidence that the emergence of a more bellicose, anti-American, and anti-Western Russian foreign policy has occured in parallel to the growing erosion of democracy inside Russia. Developing a sustainable, smart, and multi-dimensional strategy for addressing a resurgent and autocratic Russia has now crystallized as a central 21st...

“Lead us not into temptation” is the sixth petition of the Our Father. Πειρασμός (Peirasmòs), the Greek word used in this passage for ‘temptation.’, means a trial or test. Disciples petition God to be protected against the supreme test of ungodly powers. The trial is related to Jesus’s cup in Gethsemane, the same cup which his disciples would also taste (Mk 10: 35-45). The dark side of the interior of the cup is an abyss. It reveals the awful consequences of God’s judgment upon sinful humanity. In August, 1968, the weight of the evangelical Πειρασμός fell on many priests, including...

Walter Youngers’ mother said it best in the play Raisin in the Sun. Youngers is an ambitious young black man whose wife tells him she plans to abort their new child. Youngers says nothing, but Mamma speaks up. Here’s the text taken directly from the play: “I’m waiting to hear how you be your father’s son. Be the man he was. (Pause. The silence shouts.) Your wife say she going to destroy your child. And I’m waiting to hear you talk like him and say we a people who give children life, not who destroys them — (she rises) I’m...

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR. Rome Looking ahead to next October’s Synod of Bishops on the Bible, a cardinal and one of the most noted experts on scripture in the Catholic hierarchy has launched what amounts to a “preemptive strike” – appealing to his brother bishops to concentrate on practical matters, rather than revisiting theological questions settled by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the former archbishop of Milan and a former rector of the Pontficial Biblical Institute in Rome, published his recommendations in the Feb. 2 issue of La Civiltà Cattolica, a Jesuit-run journal that enjoys...

The Medal of Honor is the nation’s highest decoration for bravery during combat operations. The president presents the medal in the name of Congress to a member of the military who has “distinguished himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States.” Congress has awarded the medal to three soldiers—all posthumously—during the War on Terror, most recently to Lieutenant Michael Patrick Murphy of the U.S. Navy. In June 2005, Lt. Murphy was leading his four-man SEAL team in...

All men are mortal but few give it much thought. The round of daily tasks, diversions of various sorts, keep the thought at bay. So much so that the death of another can come almost as a surprise and seem a breach in the natural order of things. We have to put our minds to it really to think that we shall some day die. Poets and philosophers seem to relish this task. Death in Homer is a vast subject but the abiding theme is that death is a gloomy disaster. It would be better if it were an utter...