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St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell said on Thursday that he will not charge the former Ferguson police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014. Bell said that the significance of the case and requests from Michael Brown’s family prompted his office to quietly re-open an investigation about five months ago, but the office did not have enough evidence to disprove a self-defense claim in trial. “This is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do as an elected official,” Bell said beginning a news conference Thursday.

The Trump campaign released a timeline of actions on the Chinese coronavirus COVID-19 taken by President Trump and his administration since early January through March 18. The virus originated in late November in the city of Wuhan, Hubei province in China. The communist Chinese government covered-up and lied about the virus, slowing the world’s reaction and unleashing the pandemic. Critics of Trump have accused him of doing nothing or not enough to contain the virus in the early days of January and February. This timeline shows that to not be true, but it does not account for Trump’s overly optimistic...

It rained on their parade. And they didn't care. After 52 years, a little liquid sunshine wasn't going to stop the long-suffering hockey fans in St. Louis from celebrating their team's first-ever Stanley Cup win in euphoric fashion. The city’s director of special events was expecting about 500,000 people to attend Saturday’s downtown parade and rally at the Gateway Arch. Afterward, Jeremy Rutherford of The Athletic reported that city and team officials revised that estimate to “more than one million.” It was par for the course for a fanbase that had shown up in a big way as the Blues’...

A substitute teacher who has taught for years at Parkway South High School claims school administrators banned him from working there after he thanked students for saying the Pledge of Allegiance and a student complained. The substitute teacher, Jim Furkin, told the Parkway School Board his story at their meeting Wednesday night and asked them to look into it. “I’d like to know what happened,” Furkin said. ------------- Furkin told the Post-Dispatch that in late October he was the substitute teacher for a freshman English class at Parkway South High when the school made its daily announcements over the PA...

After House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., sent his memo laying out potential abuses of the FISA process by the FBI to the White House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that he be removed as chairman. Nunes was “deliberately dishonest” in pushing to release a “bogus memo,” Pelosi declared, and had “disgraced the House Intelligence Committee” with his “partisan effort to distort intelligence.” But Democrats can’t so easily dismiss the far more detailed declassified criminal referral written by two respected Republican senators — Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey O. Graham, R-S.C. — which confirms the claims raised in...

Bones attributed to St. Peter have been found by chance in a church in Rome during routine restoration work, 2,000 years after the apostle’s death. The relics of the saint, who is regarded as the first Pope, were found in clay pots in the 1,000-year-old Church of Santa Maria in Cappella in the district of Trastevere, a medieval warren of cobbled lanes on the banks of the Tiber River. The bones were discovered when a worker lifted up a large marble slab near the medieval altar of the church, which has been closed to the public for 35 years because...

Bishop Robert J. Shaheen, the first Maronite priest to be ordained in the United States and a priest and bishop in St. Louis for a half-century, died Aug. 9. Bishop Shaheen, who celebrated his 80th birthday in June, was the second bishop of the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles, headquartered in St. Louis. He retired in 2013. A celebration of the Divine Liturgy (funeral) was held Aug. 16 at St. Raymond Maronite Cathedral in St. Louis. He will be buried Monday, Aug. 21, from St. Anthony Maronite Church in his hometown of Danbury, Conn. "We pray...

It’s election season, and I’ve hesitated to say much on the subject for many reasons. One of those reasons is because our obsession with politics is unhealthy and unholy (in that it reflects our fixation on this life rather than the next, and on worldly power instead of true discipleship). Another is that this election season has been like watching a slow-burning dumpster fire. I don’t plan to tell you how to vote, but I do want to establish a few basic principles: No well-formed Catholic should feel comfortable with Trump or Clinton; Thus, voters face a difficult decision this...

The life of St. Joseph is largely veiled to us by history. While there are some writings from the early centuries of the Church about St. Joseph, they are part of the apocryphal literature. Writings in this category are largely viewed with suspicion, as they were written more to convey hidden, secret knowledge that was believed to be needed to attain salvation, rather than to give an account of events that took place. We also have the writings of mystics such as Anne Catherine Emmerich and the Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda, which pass along vivid details of...

Today is February 2nd, which means (besides the annual showing of Groundhog Day) that it’s the Feast of the Presentation, better known as Candlemas. Candlemas is actually the holiday behind Groundhog Day, in that there was an old folk tradition that a sunny Candlemas meant a long winter, but that’s another story. More to the point, Candlemas is a turning point in the year. If you pray the four seasonal Marian antiphons, today marks the first day of a new season. If you don’t pray them, or don’t know what they are, read on.

The Dormition of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary: After the Ascension of the Lord, the Mother of God remained in the care of the Apostle John the Theologian, and during his journeys She lived at the home of his parents, near the Mount of Olives. She was a source of consolation and edification both for the Apostles and for all the believers. Conversing with them, She told them about miraculous events: the Annunciation, the seedless and undefiled Conception of Christ born of Her, about His early childhood, and about His earthly life. Like the Apostles, She helped...

One month after Father Emil Kapaun, a heroic Korean War chaplain, received the Medal of Honor posthumously during a White House ceremony, he was remembered at a special outdoor Mass celebrated at St. Jude Regional Catholic School in Rockville. Father Paul Lee - the pastor of the Shrine of St. Jude Parish whose own family had escaped Communist North Korea as refugees - celebrated the Mass on May 9 with a makeshift altar set up on the hood of an olive-colored Jeep, just as Father Kapaun had done when ministering to soldiers on the front line more than six decades...

Listers, we’ve catalogued the first ten Vicars of Christ for the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Save the information on our first pope – St. Peter – all the information presented is taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia and links for further reading are provided. 1. Pope St. Peter (32-67) St. Peter held a primacy amongst the twelve disciples that earned him the title “Prince of the Apostles.” This primacy of St. Peter was solidified when he was appointed by Jesus to the Office of the Vicar – demonstrated by Christ giving St. Peter the Keys to the Kingdom. To...

Mary: Mother of God Fundamentalists are sometimes horrified when the Virgin Mary is referred to as the Mother of God. However, their reaction often rests upon a misapprehension of not only what this particular title of Mary signifies but also who Jesus was, and what their own theological forebears, the Protestant Reformers, had to say regarding this doctrine. A woman is a man’s mother either if she carried him in her womb or if she was the woman contributing half of his genetic matter or both. Mary was the mother of Jesus in both of these senses; because she not...

THE BOOK As human beings we are constantly engaging and disengaging in everything we do. We engage and disengage at work, in marriage, as parents, in our quest for health and well-being, in personal finances, environmentally, politically, and, of course, we engage or disengage spiritually. If you walk into any Catholic church next Sunday and look around, you will discover that some people are highly engaged, others are massively disengaged, and the majority are somewhere in between. Why? What is the difference between highly engaged Catholics and disengaged Catholics? Answering this question is essential to the future of the Catholic...

My daughter Heather, visiting from her home Madison, Wis., for Thanksgiving, took me by surprise with a peculiar request: She asked me to take her to Ferguson. All the more peculiar was the fact that this was a week ago yesterday, while the ruins of gutted businesses still smoldered from fires set barely 36 hours before. Heather wasnÂ’t asking just some random dad. She knew that mine had been one of the Post-DispatchÂ’s fingers on that communityÂ’s pulse since the shooting of Michael Brown on Aug. 9. IÂ’m police and court editor here, which accounts for why I havenÂ’t had...

As we approach the grand jury decision after more than 80 days of protest, we understand that some members of the community are growing tired of civil unrest. They are asking questions about how it can end. Here are the Don’t Shoot Coalition’s answers to some of those questions. Protesters may have some points to make, but why can’t they express them peacefully? The protests have been 99.5 percent nonviolent. But we are also being purposefully militant and disruptive. Change has not come through the courts, through politics or through gentle persuasion. We cannot wait any longer for whole segments...

ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) – An attempted home invasion turned into a murder investigation Tuesday morning. One suspect is dead and another is in critical condition after allegedly holding a gun to a teen’s head. St. Louis police are releasing chilling details of a late night shooting in south St. Louis that left one person dead, another injured and a neighborhood shaken up. It all went down at 11:00pm last night on Newport near Neosho in the Bevo Mill neighborhood. Investigators say it all started with a teenaged girl being confronted by two armed men in front of her home....

FARMINGTON, Mo. • It is a special Easter for Wilma Whitworth, who is undergoing a spiritual rebirth, just a week before her 78th birthday. Whitworth is celebrating her first day as a full-fledged Catholic this holiday. And she’s doing so in a largely Protestant town that is undergoing a kind of Catholic revival. St. Joseph Catholic Church, or St. Joe’s as the locals call it, has had 24 children and adults, ages 7 and above, convert to the faith in the past year. There is no one answer for the rise in Catholic conversion in this town of 17,000 an...

If a Protes­tant look­ing into the claims of Catholi­cism were to ask me, “What one book should I read, where I can find a quick answer to any ques­tion I have?” I would tell him to read Devin Rose’s new book The Protestant’s Dilemma. I would also rec­om­mend this book to Protes­tant apol­o­gists, even those of many years, well-skilled in polemics. It will remind them of the heavy bur­den of proof they face, and the weak­ness of their posi­tion on point after point. The truth may set them free and bring them home too. (It has happened.) All this may...