Free Republic

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen the headlines jeering at men after the news broke that a trial for male birth control was cancelled because men “couldn’t handle” the side effects. The mocking was practically immediate. Men were derided as being whiners who were unwilling to tolerate the side effects that women endure every month, so not only were they weak, they were misogynists as well.People titled Julie Mazziotta’s article “Men Back Out of Male Birth Control Study Because They Couldn’t Handle the ‘Changes in Mood.’” She wrote that it was time for guys to “woman up.”...

Many of you know that for more than 4 years, I have been one of the leaders of the team representing religious organizations, mostly Catholic (including Bishop David Zubik, Bishop of Pittsburgh’s Catholic Diocese) in his case which was consolidated in the U.S. Supreme Court with the case brought by The Little Sisters of the Poor and cases brought by others, against the government over Obamacare’s “contraception mandate.” A great number of religious groups of all denominations filed “friend of the Court” briefs supporting our position that while contraception is and could be available to all who choose to use...

URGENT: Pledge to boycott Catholic Relief Services until they commit to Church teaching. Sign here! BALTIMORE, Maryland , October 17, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Catholic Relief Services facilitated the distribution of more than two million units of various types of contraception, including abortifacients, in the Democratic Republic of Congo over the course of four years, the Lepanto Institute says in a new report. The program resulted in skyrocketing birth control use in the region where previously residents had minimal knowledge of contraception, says Lepanto. The US Bishops’ international relief agency was an implementing partner from 2006 to 2010 in the US-funded...

September 16, 2016 (C-Fam) – Three powerful UN agencies are sponsoring the release of a document next week that calls for the Catholic Church to change her teachings on contraception, but also mentions that teachings on homosexuality, masturbation and in vitro fertilization should be changed as well. The document was prepared by dissident ex-priest John Wijngaards, who is based in the United Kingdom, and has been signed so far by more than 100 dissenting Catholic academics and a small number of non-Catholics. The document is being released in preparation for the 2018 50th anniversary of the Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae,...

Intimately good In marriage, couples exchange a right to expect a reasonable recourse to sexual intimacy Msgr. Charles Pope September 18, 2016 9/7/2016 Question: If one spouse indicates an unwillingness to have any more children, would the other spouse be free to refuse all sexual intimacy? — Name Withheld, Wichita, Kansas Answer: You raise and link two issues that must first be treated separately. In the second matter, refusing all marital intimacy, except for a grave cause, is a violation of the rights of one’s spouse. When a man and a woman marry, they exchange, among other goods, what Canon...

CHICAGO, June 13, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Catholics are not alone in holding that birth control is a sin against God. Father Patrick Henry Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in Chicago, who’s also an author and senior editor for the Christian magazine Touchstone, spoke in a recently published YouTube video of how throughout history until the 20th century all Christians, not just the Orthodox, but the Church fathers and Protestants as well, regarded birth control use as immoral and a sin. “Now it’s lost,” he states in the video. “And the Church really must not go with...

LOS ANGELES, June 7, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop José Gomez tore apart the “seamless garment” argument that intrinsic evils and social ills are morally equivalent in the Los Angeles archdiocesan newspaper June 3.  Advocates of the “seamless garment” approach to moral issues and social justice, promoted by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, often use it to suggest a moral equivalency between issues like abortion, poverty, and immigration.  “The hard truth is that not all injustices in the world are ‘equal,’” wrote Gomez. “We can understand this perhaps better about issues in the past than we can with issues in...

Western civilisation is on the brink of a collapse like that of ancient Rome because the modern generation does not want the responsibility of bringing up children, the former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks has warned. ... ultimately, he said, European society as we know it “will die” because of the demographic crisis. And mass immigration is not a solution because of problems integrating new arrivals into existing society. "Europe is going to die because of this because Europe can only maintain its population by unprecedented levels of immigration" - Lord Sacks This makes him one of only a handful of...

MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte said he will defy the Roman Catholic Church and seek to impose a three-child policy, putting him on a new collision course with the bishops a day after he called them "sons of whores". The southern mayor has yet to be declared the May 9 poll winner, but an unofficial vote count by an election commission-accredited watchdog showed him ahead over his four rivals, three of whom conceded defeat. Duterte assumes office on June 30. Duterte's often outrageous comments have won him huge support and his tirades about killing criminals and a joke...

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Monday vacated lower court rulings against religious non-profits objecting to Obamacare’s “contraceptive mandate.”The court did not rule on the merits of Zubik v. Burwell, a closely-watched case that included the Little Sisters of the Poor, several Catholic dioceses and colleges and Priests for Life. But in the unsigned decision, the eight justices said the government may not fine the non-profits involved. The court sent the case back to the lower courts, saying the parties to the case “should be afforded an opportunity to arrive at an approach going forward that accommodates petitioners’ religious exercise while at the same time ensuring that women covered...

While the consensus view seems to be that the Supreme Court “punted” today by sending the Little Sisters of the Poor case back to the lower courts, I must respectfully dissent. Although the Court didn’t rule on the merits of the case, the Little Sisters won a significant victory — one that is likely (though not yet certain) to persist through the next administration.  First, the Supreme Court vacated the lower court ruling holding that the Little Sisters had to facilitate access to contraceptives and denied that the mandate substantially burdened their religion. Speaking as a person who’s argued a...

Pope Francis said Friday that Catholics should look to their own consciences more than Vatican rules to negotiate the complexities of sex, marriage and family life, demanding the church shift its emphasis from doctrine to mercy in confronting some of the thorniest issues facing the faithful. In a major church document entitled “The Joy of Love,” Francis made no explicit change in church doctrine and upheld church teaching on the lifelong bond of marriage between a man and a woman. But in selectively citing his predecessors and emphasizing his own teachings in strategically placed footnotes, Francis made innovative openings in...

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a group of cases challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that non-profit employers offer health-care coverage that includes contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization. The challengers in the consolidated cases, captioned Zubik v. Burwell, include Little Sisters of the Poor, Priests for Life, and a variety of religious non-profits. Many of the arguments that have been put forth in support of the plaintiffs involve conscience rights. These are important arguments that certainly deserve attention. However, in the amicus brief I filed in on behalf of the Charlotte Lozier Institute, I emphasized public-health...

This is the kind of case the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia liked to sink his judicial teeth into -- whether the federal government can compel a religious entity like the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their religious beliefs and acquiesce to the ObamaCare contraceptive coverage mandate. As LifeSite News reported on Wednesday’s hearing: This week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a 175-year-old religious order of women who have vowed their lives to care for the elderly poor.

If you were totally avoiding the internet today, or if you live under a particularly pleasant and comfortable rock, maybe you don’t know that the federal government and a bunch of nuns are duking it out before the Supreme Court over birth control. More to the point, they’re fighting over the Little Sisters of the Poors’ refusal to subsidize contraception and abortion-causing drugs for their employees via their health insurance coverage, all of whom, by the way, are mandated by the President Obama’s signature eponymous government overreach law to purchase their own health insurance. Well, fair’s fair, right? I mean,...

The Pope and the Baby Killer In 2010, after I had lived in Italy about two years and had begun to understand the byzantine complexities of this country's politics, Emma Bonino decided to run for the office of governor of the region of Lazio. Once I found out what kind of person she was, I was seized with the urge to buy a crate of spray paint and go around Rome writing, "10,000 bambini assassinati non abbastanza per Emma 'la Bicicletta' Bonino," on all her posters. "10,000 murdered babies not enough for Emma 'the bicycle' Bonino." I thought of it...

Dear Pope Francis: I write this letter to you as a priest to the Bishop of Rome and as a son to a father. I write with a heavy heart, and I know that heaviness of heart is shared by many of my Catholic brethren both clergy and laity. I watched the early news one morning last week to find that one of the headlines proclaimed that in an interview on the flight from Mexico to Rome you indicated that the Church's teaching on contraception may be undergoing a change. As in the past, I went to the official translation...

From the canonist Ed Peter’s fine blog In The Light Of The Law. He doesn’t have a combox over there and doesn’t mind if we use his stuff here. DO, however, go over there to his place regularly. Emphases are from Peters, comments mine: Misunderstanding the (alleged) 'Congo contraception' caseEven by the standards of his reign, the presser Pope Francis conducted on his return flight from Mexico has provoked an unusual number of questions. [No kidding. You should see my inbox, too!] I wish to address only one of those here.Preliminarily, I note that the burden is not on the...

CONTRACEPTION So Fr Lombardi believes, apparently, that Papa Bergoglio was right: B Paul VI did permitt nuns in the Congo to guard themselves contraceptively against the consequences of rape. If there is evidence that Montini made some utterance to this effect, then we have a right to be told where it is so that we can go and look at it. That, surely, is why the Apostolic See publishes its Acta. If people are required to respect and obey a Magisterium, then Natural Justice requires that they should have the means to acquaint themselves with their obligations. Otherwise, why decimate...

In a February 8 interview with one of Italy's most prominent dailies, Corriere Della Serra, Pope Francis praised Italy's leading proponent of abortion - Emma Bonino -- as one of the nation's "forgotten greats," comparing her to great historical figures such as Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman. Knowing that his praise of her may be controversial, the Pope said that she offered the best advice to Italy on learning about Africa, and admitted she thinks differently from us. "True, but never mind," he said. "We have to look at people, at what they do." At 27, Bonino had an illegal...