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VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - A prominent American Catholic gay rights group was given VIP treatment for the first time at an audience with Pope Francis on Wednesday, a move members saw as a sign of change in the Roman Catholic Church. "This is a sign of movement that's due to the Francis effect," said Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry, which ministers to homosexual Catholics and promotes gay rights in the 1.2 billion-member Church. Gramick and executive director Francis DeBernardo led a pilgrimage of 50 homosexual Catholics to the audience in St. Peter's Square. They told Reuters in...

NEW YORK, February 17, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- As if it wasn’t controversial enough that a homosexual activist group will be marching under its own banner in the New York St. Patrick’s Day parade led by New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the parade has refused a pro-life group’s request to participate. inclined, rather than advocates for sinful behaviour. The group, however, is an overt promoter of same-sex ‘marriage.’ The controversy heightened January 22, though, when the parade officially rejected a pro-life adoption advocacy group’s application to march this year. “It’s absolutely been a double-cross,” Dr. Elizabeth Rex, president of the Children...

In our Founding Father’s day, the practice of VIRTUE was a crown of honor, not a bigot’s badge of shame. My beloved, just look what we as a nation have become today! We are a nation of godless, narcissistic, self-gratifying, infanticidal murderers - pornographic, sexually deviant, perverse, callous, adulterous, drug addicts and drunks, using the First Amendment as a license to transgress natural laws and moral absolutes in the name of secular human rights. Our American families have been truly decimated and ravished beyond remedy! Our children are godless, desensitized, brain-washed and dumbed-down nimrods corrupted by Hollywood, the godless music...

Earlier last week, in an address before French immigrants to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proudly stated that his appearance in the rally last month in Paris and his planned address to the US Congress were in his capacity "not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people." Rather than rally behind the prime minister of the Jewish State, Jews driven by a liberal agenda which is often counter to the interests of the Jewish people and the State of Israel chose to immediately go into attack mode. Social media platforms featured...

Graeme Wood writes the best analysis and description of the horror of ISIS here at The Atlantic. He goes into detail about the roots of ISIS, its relationship to mainstream Islam and the ambitions of the Caliphate. He explains how ISIS combines not only a horribly literalistic interpretation of the Koran, but also how it is interlaced with radical Muslim apocalyptic visions.He sums up the whole article pretty well with this paragraph The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter...

Along with Pope Francis and so many others, I was deeply saddened to learn of the latest violence by fanatics who see anybody who disagrees with them as their enemy.These attacks threaten civilization itself.Whether it’s a massacre in Paris, Indonesia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Iran, India or now in Libya and Egypt, we keep saying, “How much worse can it get?”And then we woke up Monday morning to see that it did get worse, with this brutal massacre of these young Egyptian Christians in Libya.They were beheaded for nothing less than their religious convictions. It moves me to prayers. It moves...

The presentations at two Orange County church meetings were similar. The crowds were not. One was predominantly Anglo. The other was Latino. Both focused on President Obama’s upcoming immigration plan and what church members could do to help 100,000 eligible undocumented immigrants across the county apply for deportation relief. The first application opening is days away. Local churches and other organizations are busily working to organize forums and training sessions. They’re looking for volunteers. They aim to help eligible immigrants apply for temporary reprieves from deportation that come with work permits. Such sessions are happening nationwide. A federal judge in...

When people say the end is near, it’s usually wise to treat them as you would have a member of a group like the American sect called the Millerites, who were convinced that the Second Coming had been scheduled, precisely by mathematical proofs from Scripture, for October 22, 1843. The rest, as they say, is history.That the world will end is beyond doubt, even in scientific terms. That no man (or woman) knows the time is, according to the plain words of Scripture, equally certain. But I admit to lending an ear, more than usual these days, to people who...

Psalm 116:5 God is Gracious—it is He Who Makes Things Right, Our Most Compassionate God. God Takes the Side of the Helpless; When I was at the End of my Rope, He Saved me.

Soon after Muslim gunmen killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo offices..., the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)—the... second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations—is again renewing calls for the United Nations to criminalize “blasphemy” against Islam, or what it more ecumenically calls, the “defamation of religions.” Yet the OIC seems to miss one grand irony: if international laws would ban cartoons, books, and films on the basis that they defame Islam, they would also, by logical extension, have to ban the entire religion of Islam itself—the only religion whose core texts actively and unequivocally defame other religions, including by...

D. James Kennedy successor keeps quiet on public moral concerns. . . When D. James Kennedy was preaching at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church – the fastest growing Presbyterian church in the nation for much of his tenure – his sermons and comments to media sometimes sparked fireworks. One time he said: “We hear today that this is a pluralistic nation and that it is not a Christian nation. But Christianity itself, general Christianity, was conceived as the support of all our government.” Kennedy, who died in 2007 after 47 years of ministry at the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, church, preached that...

Eastern Michigan University students taped their mouths shut in a silent protest Thursday. The students wrote #ChapelHillShooting across the tape in honor of the deaths of three students from the University of North Carolina. Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, were Muslim-American students at the University of North Carolina. They were shot Tuesday, Feb. 10, by their neighbor, Craig Steven Hicks, 46. The Chapel Hill police released a statement Tuesday evening citing a parking dispute as Hicks’s motivation. EMU Junior Layali Alsada and senior Zaeem Zafar created a flyer...

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Daily Mail:The veteran Hollywood actress suggests the six million Jews and millions of others systematically murdered in Hitler’s death camps in the 1940s were ‘balancing their karma’ for crimes committed in past lives. She also suggests that cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking may have subconsciously given himself his debilitating motor neurone disease. Really, Shirley? Actress Shirley MacLaine has been denounced by Jewish campaigners and other activists after suggesting that the millions of victims of Nazi death camps may...

 How Did James & John Envision Jesus' Kingdom?  They Asked to Sit at His Right & Left Hand; the Other Ten Were Indignant.  What Was This Kingdom They Thought They Would Rule?  What Eventually Became of Them All?  The Apostles Believed that Jesus Would Restore the Kingdom of David, Which Was at Its Greatest Extent and Stability in the Time of his son Solomon.  But Jesus's Apostles Spread His Kingdom Worldwide, Far Beyond the Greatest Extent of Israel's Empire.  The Apostles Never Could Have Imagined Their Eventual Fates.  The Apostles "Get Down to Business", Trying to Establish the Pecking Order...

The Islamic State has announced the killing of 21 Eyptian Christians who were abducted from Libya early in January. A report issued on the internet by the Islamic State said that the Coptic Christians were killed in “revenge for the Muslim women persecuted by Coptic crusaders in Egypt.” The reference was evidently to an incident in which two Egyptian women married to Copts were allegedly pressured to repudiate Islam. The Egyptian government has not confirmed the deaths of the 21 kidnapping victims, but fears that the internet report is accurate. Additional sources for this storySome links will take you to...

A Christian college and two Catholic dioceses in western Pennsylvania are again under the yoke of the HHS mandate as a federal court reversed the injunctions previously granted to the institutions by lower courts. Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., the Diocese of Pittsburgh, the Diocese of Erie, and several Catholic charities under the dioceses had all been granted injunctions from the HHS mandate. But on Wednesday, a panel of judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit unanimously ruled to reverse the exemptions. Judge Marjorie Rendell noted in her opinion that the institutions can take advantage...

Papacy built on pious fiction and forgery, part 1 J. Gresham Machen said, in his 1915 lecture "History and Faith," that "The student of the New Testament should be primarily an historian." And in fact, thanks to the last few centuries' worth of historical criticism, and a couple of “historical Jesus” quests, both the life of Jesus and the history of the New Testament have undergone a thorough historical examination, and in the process, have only had their historical reliability enhanced. On the other hand, what we've been told about the early papacy has fallen away like chaff. Instead...

The recent attack on a French satirical magazine renewed Americans’ pass to keep talking seriously about Islam as a threat. In America’s arena of religious intolerance, Muslims are the easiest targets imaginable. So easy, in fact, that another religious movement can chime in on the bigotry of such attacks while keeping a straight face. In light of the political gains being made by the Christian Right, it’s clear that the religious fanatics who should be stopped can less often be found in a mosque than in Congress. The movement does not deserve our tolerance. It’s fascinated by violence, ferociously intolerant...

Credit: fsecart via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Rome, Italy, Feb 12, 2015 / 04:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- While church attendees dwindle in Germany, questions have arisen once again over the controversial state-imposed church tax – and whether it's time for the country's bishops to address concerns around it. “We are in a time when more and more people realize that the financial apparatus Church works well, that the facade is optimal but what is behind it? Where is the true faith?” asked Martin Lohmann, Catholic publicist, author and spokesperson of the advocacy group Christian Action in Germany. “While we have...

Influential Catholics—many of them supporters of Barack Obama—are advancing a proposition that may have the result of sullying the reputations of Catholic conservatives and those Catholics arguing for a robust market economy.They couch their arguments in Catholic Social Teaching; the common good, political community, love for the poor, subsidiarity. They compare this over against libertarianism; a radical individualism where each man sets and makes his own course that—damn all the rest—leads to his flourishing unless the heavy hand of the state interrupts it. Above all—to radical individualists—the State is the Enemy. Except some of what these people call libertarianism,...