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The U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops is issuing a flyer to be distributed at Masses over the March 3-4 weekend that asks their congregation to voice their opposition to the Obama administration's requirement that all employers pay for their employees' contraceptives. The mandate, which President Obama has given just one year for compliance, would force Catholic hospitals - for instance - to pay for contraceptives, even though contrary to Catholic teachings. Besides the Catholic bishops, other religious groups, including non-Christians and secular people, have criticized the Obama administration's move as an unconstitutional intromission into religious freedoms and the freedom of association. The bishops ask their congregations to contact their Members of Congress to voice their opposition...

[1]Larry Doyle The reaction of Catholic leaders to Larry Doyle’s satiric piece at HuffPo this week, “The Jesus-Eating Cult of Rick Santorum,” has been exactly the wrong reaction. We have taken offense, demanded apologies of Arianna Huffington, and asked that we please not be exposed through satire to the virulently-anti Catholic opinions of the Church’s opponents. Doyle’s piece, like the shows for which he has written, “Beavis and Butthead,” and “The Simpsons,” was crude. There’s no doubt about that.He led off“It’s time to take a good hard look at Rick Santorum’s faith.“Many of you will be shocked to learn...

Promiscuous: not restricted to one sexual partner (Merriam Webster, Tenth edition 1993) Slut: a woman who has had many sexual partners (Merriam Webster Learner’s Dictionary) Great indignation spreads across the land. A famous blabbermouth, who calls a spade a spade, has called a slut a slut. But in our values-neutral society, we embrace a new normal: multiple sexual partners and the one-night-stand. The consequence? Today’s young women don’t recognize that each time they spread their legs to welcome a new lover; they inch up the slut scale. “Slut” is outmoded lingo and thus, they are sluts no more.

So much talk amongst right wing Catholics of the erosion of religious liberty, the collapse of all things and the coming persecution. Talk of government detention centers and priests being shot like Bl. Miguel Pro. I don't think they get it. That's not what it will be like. America is different. We're into image big time. We thought the Soviets were into brainwashing and propaganda. We put them in the shade. America is all about healthy, lusty, good looking guys and gals who are clean cut, successful and smiling. We're into the good life. We're into being good and...

It is a well-known phenomenon that generals have a tendency to “Fight the Last War,” meaning that they tend to use the tactics that brought them victory in the last war they fought. The problem is that the enemy usually shows up with new weapons and new tactics. Either the generals adapt, or go down to defeat.In the war over the HHS Mandate, it seems that the bishops have shown up with Cardinal O’Connor’s playbook from the 1980′s. It won’t work, and they had better grasp that reality today, and with all due urgency.This past week, Francis Cardinal George of...

From Cardinal Timothy Dolan's March 2nd, three-page letter to his fellow bishops:We will continue to accept invitations to meet with and to voice our concerns to anyone of any party, for this is hardly partisan, who is willing to correct the infringements on religious freedom that we are now under. But as we do so, we cannot rely on off the record promises of fixes without deadlines and without assurances of proposals that will concretely address the concerns in a manner that does not conflict with our principles and teaching. Congress might provide more hope, since thoughtful elected officials have...

(Warning: I utilize anatomically-correct terms referencing sexual organs in a non-vulgar yet frank fashion on this post. If you object to this language, please don’t continue reading this post)Brethren, Peace be with all of you.Rush Limbaugh’s recent criticism of Georgetown University’s (a Catholic institution) law student Sandra Fluke’s stance in favor of the Obama Administration’s conscience-violating contraception mandate, has charged the debate in such a way that our objections to the Administration’s mandate will be more difficult to explain and sustain. Miss Fluke is now being portrayed as a victim and this portrayal will drown the debate into irrelevancies. Her...

Jonah Goldberg's most recent "Goldberg File" comments at length, and with several good points, on the maddening way that modern liberalism presents itself as an objective, secular belief system above the superstitious, backwards fray of traditional (and non-traditional) religions: Speaking of Liberal Fascism, one of its core themes -- and mine -- is that modern liberalism is a political religion. That's why I've been so intrigued and frustrated by the discussion around Rick Santorum and his various comments, including: His ham-fisted remarks about wanting to vomit after reading JFK's church-state speech, his defense of religious freedom, his insistence that Obama's...

From his blog today: The President invited us to “work out the wrinkles,” and we have been taking him seriously. Unfortunately, this seems to be going nowhere: the White House Press Secretary, for instance, informed the nation that the mandates are a fait accompli (and, embarrassingly for him, commented that we bishops have always opposed Health Care anyway, a charge that is simply scurrilous and insulting). The White House already notified Congress that the dreaded mandates are now published in the Federal Registry “without change.” The Secretary of HHS is widely quoted as saying, “Religious insurance companies don’t really design...

Take a look back at the results of the Michigan Republican Primary, and you might be surprised at who is embracing Catholic teaching. Video : Santorum and the Vote

Deacon Greg posted the following update to his story. It seems that someone from St. John Newmann wrote to him the following:just wanted to let you know that there is a lot more to this story than has been published। I was in a meeting with Fr Marcel and heard the whole story। The woman in question brought her lesbian partner into the vesting sacristy just before the funeral Mass and made sure to introduce her partner to Fr Marcel, introducing her as her ‘lover’. He told her then that she should not present herself for Communion. I have been...

Vice President Joe Biden, reflecting on the contraception debate that forced the administration to alter the policy to appease Catholic leaders, said that the administration "screwed up" the first version of the mandate. “I was the one that was tasked to meet with the National Conference of Bishops, and others and Cardinal Dolan, to talk about this," Biden said in remarks at Iowa State University Thursday. "The fact of the matter is, the ultimate resolution to this problem is where it should have been in the first place.”

Introduction: At the beginning of Holy Week in 1868, haunting dreams began to trouble Don Bosco, and they “went on for several miserable nights.”“These dreams so exhausted me,” he stated, “that in the morning I felt more done in than if I had been working all night. They also alarmed and upset me very much.”The most frightful, but also the most salutary of these dreams occurred on Friday, April 10th. It is the account of this dream, which we have reprinted below. The reader will notice that, in this dream, Don Bosco is accompanied by a man who acted...

PAV Assembly in a conference center next to St. Peter's Basilica VATICAN CITY, February 27, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A gathering of the Vatican’s own academy for promoting respect for life was met with palpable discontent from its own members and other registrants after presenters on the topic of infertility alluded to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other artificial reproduction technologies as “natural” and legitimate for treating patients, despite their conflict with Catholic moral teaching. In addition, one prominent Catholic doctor who noted the link between the birth control pill and breast cancer was told by the moderator that his claim was...

Tonya Parker says until same-sex licenses are legal in Texas, she will not sign the forms.A Black, openly lesbian Texas judge is refusing to conduct straight-couple marriage ceremonies in her state until same-sex couples can wed. The judge, Tonya Parker, recently explained her decision during a Stonewall Democrats of Dallas monthly meeting. “I do not perform them because it is not an equal application of the law. Period,” she said, reports the NY Daily News. Parker says she is using her decision as an opportunity to give a lesson about marriage equality in the state. “So I usually will offer...

Racist apologetics by a popular Brigham Young University religion professor are sparking controversy, as election-year scrutiny sheds a revealing light on the persistence of racist belief among LDS Church members. On Tuesday, Randy Bott, a BYU professor of religion, told the Washington Post that the LDS Church’s historic prohibition on priesthood ordination for men of African descent was a “blessing” to blacks because they were not “ready” for priesthood authority. “God has always been discriminatory” when it comes to whom he grants the authority of the priesthood, says Bott... Bott compares blacks with a young child prematurely asking for the...

EDINBURGH, U.K., February 29, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Judgment was handed down today in the case of two senior midwives from Glasgow who have a conscientious objection to abortion. The midwives have been told that they must accept the decision of their hospital management that they must oversee other midwives performing abortions on the labour ward. Lady Smith, judge in the Court of Session in Edinburgh, ruled that the senior midwives’ role is not covered by the conscience clause in the Abortion Act. Both the midwives have served for over 20 years at the Southern General Hospital, caring for many thousands...

In a February 14 note to his people, Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., the archbishop of Chicago, commented on the question of “who speaks for the Catholic Church,” which had become a subject of public controversy thanks to the Obama administration’s “contraceptive mandate”—which is, of course, an abortifacient and sterilization mandate as well. The cardinal noted the administration’s crude attempt to play divide-and-conquer with the Catholic Church in the United States, a ploy to which some nominally Catholic groups quickly acquiesced. Yet something important in all of this was being missed, the cardinal suggested: “The bishops of the Church make no...

A good sermon on 5 February 2012 by Fr. Sammie Maletta at St. John the Evangelist Parish in St. John, Indiana.You will not regret the 11 minutes you spend. LISTEN HEREGood job, Father.WDTPRS kudos. From Courageous Priest ... Father Sammie Maletta Quotes from his Sermon For those of you who voted for I cannot believe you voted for this (referring to the mandate).Let us be clear, President Obama let us be CatholicThe government wants to get in our business and tell us how to run our business, how to run our Churches.I cannot make a decision about the Church without...

Deep in grief, Barbara Johnson stood first in the line for Communion at her mother’s funeral Saturday morning. But the priest in front of her immediately made it clear that she would not receive the sacramental bread and wine. Johnson, an art-studio owner from the District, had come to St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg with her lesbian partner. The Rev. Marcel Guarnizo had learned of their relationship just before the service. “He put his hand over the body of Christ and looked at me and said, ‘I can’t give you Communion because you live with a woman, and...