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Lewis and Clark Stop celebrating. They don't matter. By David Plotz Posted Friday, August 16, 2002, at 7:40 AM PT The American infatuation with Lewis and Clark grows more fervent with every passing year. The adventurers have become our Extreme Founding Fathers, as essential to American history as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but a lot more fun. Last month, President Bush announced the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, a three-year, 15-state pageant that begins Jan. 18 in Virginia and could draw as many as 25 million tourists to the Lewis and Clark trail by the time it wraps up...

Mayor Pete Buttigieg at Notre Dame — ‘Friends in High Places’ A look at the inroads the gay and lesbian alumni association has made during the Fr. Jenkins administration Last March, Notre Dame gave the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association of Notre Dame (GALA) and its gay marriage agenda a boost by allowing GALA to honor presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg and to stage a panel supporting same-sex married teachers in Catholic high schools. We describe these events below and take a look at the inroads GALA has made during the Jenkins administration. GALA and Same-Sex Marriage In a previous bulletin, we...

NEW YORK - Nearly three months after a fire devastated Paris’s famed Notre Dame Cathedral, France’s National Assembly moved closer to enacting legislation to approve the restoration process and timeline for one of the world’s most beloved landmarks. By a vote of 32 in favor, 7 against, and 8 abstentions, the country’s primary legislative body voted on Wednesday to adopt a resolution that establishes a national plan for accepting donations toward the rebuilding efforts and adheres to French President Emmanuel Macron’s intent to have the work done before Paris plays host to the Olympics in 2024. This marked the second...

Investigators have still not been able to find the cause of the blaze An initial investigation into the devastating fire that consumed much of Notre-Dame cathedral in April has found no signs of criminal action behind the blaze, French officials said Wednesday. Chief Prosecutor of Paris Remy Heitz said in a statement that the investigations so far have not been able to pinpoint a cause of the fire but have found no evidence that it was deliberate, the BBC reported. “Deeper investigations” will be carried out, he said. Officials conducted 100 witness hearings in the initial stage of their investigation,...

In a significant way, "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg is the embodiment of his father Joseph — and, by extension, Antonio Gramsci. Buttigieg Senior was a professor of critical theory and the relationship between culture and politics at Notre Dame University from 1980 until his retirement in 2017.  (The man, a smoker who wouldn't quit, died of lung cancer in 2019.)  Academically, Joseph Buttigieg spent his entire professional life editing the journals of Antonio Gramsci.  According to a N.D. alumni newsletter, Professor Buttigieg's work on Gramsci has been spread far and wide, with his work having been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. ...

NOTRE DAME WINS: Iconic French Cathedral to be Faithfully Restored Photo: Walter MattIn the April 30th issue of The Remnant Newspaper, the week after Notre Dame burned and amid rumors of coming glass roofs and “modernists monstrosities”, Michael Matt wrote the following: And if we’re to make an educated conjecture on what will happen to Notre Dame in Paris, perhaps we should look to Notre Dame de Chartres (also UNESCO World Heritage Site) which for the past ten years has been undergoing one of the greatest state-sponsored restoration projects in Europe. The state will restore Notre Dame in all of her...

On Monday evening, the French Senate approved the government's Notre-Dame restoration bill - but added a clause that it must be restored to the state it was before the blaze, striking a blow to the government which had launched an international architecture competition to debate ideas on the restoration. The subject of the rebuilding of the cathedral - which was left badly damaged after fire tore through the roof and destroyed the spire on April 15 - has become a fraught battleground between traditionalists who want an exact restoration and others who favour a more imaginative take. Some of the...

Turkey: Many Celebrate the Burning of the Cathedral of Notre Dame by Uzay Bulut The official Facebook page of Turkey's pro-government daily, Sabah, for example, is filled with praise for the destruction of the cathedral. Sadly, Islamic supremacism not only targets the churches of Western Christians. It targets Yazidi, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu temples too. These religious minorities in the Muslim world are completely vulnerable, defenseless and severely persecuted.... In many Muslim countries, Muslim-on-Muslim violence is also quite commonplace. The Islamic hatred of different religious groups is not about geography -- the East or the West. It is about religious...

It's been almost a month since one of the great structures of the Western world - the Cathedral of Notre Dame - caught on fire. At first there were a flurry of reports about the possible causes of the fire. But then, next to nothing. It seems like the entire event has disappeared down a rabbit hole.

Fr. John Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, recently decided to cover murals of Christopher Columbus because they were deemed too offensive to be viewed by Notre Dame students. One week later, he rejected a student petition calling for a pornography filter on Notre Dame’s Wi-Fi. We are dumbfounded. Does the University of Notre Dame really believe Christopher Columbus is more harmful than porn? Notre Dame has taught us to make a difference in our community, and we saw a chance to do just that through the filter initiative. Pornography consumption is an enormous problem at Notre Dame and for all people...

On April 19, 2019, Frontpage Mag published Milo Yiannopoulos’ lamentation on the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral. While I share his grief over this irreplaceable loss to Western Civilization and Christianity, I was shocked to discover that he felt the necessity to trash the Jews. He did so under the convenient cover that he is a Jew -- as he states, through matrilineal descent. But, more significant than his bloodline, his belief system seems to be Catholic as evidenced by his adoration of the Virgin Mary: Mary—the ‘Our Lady’ of Notre Dame—is proof of the incarnation. It is her...

Notre Dame fire represents a Church that must finish burning and ‘finally die’: priest CHESTNUT HILL, Massachusetts, May 3, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A Chilean priest caused outrage when he commented on the Notre Dame cathedral fire, saying the destructive event represents how the Church has become “insignificant” and needs to “finish burning and dying.” "What a prophetic beginning of Holy Week!” wrote Fr. Nemo Castelli, SJ on Facebook in Spanish. “I know that it is a marvelous heritage of the humanity of the 12th century, that it took almost 200 years to build it, that it is the most visited...

The recent fire in Notre Dame Cathedral has highlighted the attempts of the powerful to control the news. The Paris prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, has decided the fire was "likely accident, not arson."  When reporting his decision, it is easy to eliminate the word "likely" for the sake of brevity.  (Please excuse the sarcasm.)  Luke Baker, Reuters's Paris bureau chief, tweeted, "Fire at Paris' Notre Dame cathedral was started by accident and is related to ongoing work, according to France 2, citing police."  There it is: the orthodox truth.  If you don't accept the "orthodox" story, you are a "conspiracy theorist," an...

Former Notre Dame Cathedral architect Benjamin Mouton in a live broadcast April 16 on the French TV network LCI: When the Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith hung up on French politician and media analyst Philippe Karsenty during live coverage of the Notre Dame Cathedral blaze, authorities already were speculating the catastrophe that gripped the world was caused by an accident. Although speculation is the coin of the cable-news realm, an indignant Smith wanted nothing to do with Karsenty providing context to the April 15 fire – nearly 2,000 attacks on French churches in two years – that would suggest an...

The Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit, is renowned for his calm demeanor and easy-going manner. That made it all the more significant when, during a recent radio interview following President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation about the burning of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Aupetit expressed his astonishment at Macron’s failure to mention Catholics as among those affected by the drama surrounding what is, after all, a functioning and active Catholic cathedral. “Le mot catholique n’est pas un gros mot,” he insisted. (“The word ‘Catholic’ is not a swear word.”) In the aftermath of the fire which destroyed a major part of...

Tuesday, the president gave a short address on French television, promising to rebuild Notre Dame in five years — a rash promise, according to specialists — and speaking about its spiritual dimension but carefully avoiding any mention of Catholicism. “It would have been nice if there had been a little word of compassion for the Catholic community,” Msgr. Aupetit wryly remarked on Sud Radio on Wednesday. “We are aching very badly because of the loss of our cathedral, this is Holy Week and we shall have to reorganize our prayers completely. It would’ve been nice if there had been a...

The Easter bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka remind us that it is dangerous to be a practicing Christian today in many parts of the world.The Wall Street Journal reports, “There were at least eight explosions, most blamed on suicide bombers. Six of the attacks were coordinated and were carried out by seven suicide bombers, according to a preliminary examination of scattered body parts by the country’s official experts.”The bombs, of course, went off on the high Christian holiday of Easter, killing more than 300 people.And the Journal adds, “Authorities took 24 people into custody in connection with the...

In the same article, the Post also reports on a backlash against this amazing generosity. A leader of the Yellow Vest movement says that if donors can give so much money to rebuild Notre Dame, “they should stop telling us there is no money to help deal with the social emergency.” But the donations to Notre Dame are coming from private donors. No one denies they have money. It’s the French government that’s running out. Some in the Yellow Vest movement probably favor the government taking yet more money from the wealthy “to help deal with the social emergency.” That’s...

Although it is the world’s oldest continually operating library, dating back to the 6th century, the collection of manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai is no stranger to the latest technology. In 2012, they began spectral imaging on many of the manuscripts to discover the texts beneath the texts. Many of the manuscripts are palimpsests, meaning a previous text had been erased so the scribe could reuse the valuable parchments. Traces of the original texts remained, however. Now the monastery has begun a high-tech process of digitizing its 4,500 manuscripts—a process that could easily take...

The French artisans and stone masons of yore are rolling in their graves.