Free Republic

Pope Leo XIII was born in 1810. At that time James Madison was president of the United States and Napoleon was master of Europe. This remarkable film was shot in 1896.

Three Of Nation's Highest-Ranking Catholic Leaders Warned Congress Hundreds More Closures Likely Without Federal SupportNEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – As the new academic year arrives, school systems across the United States are struggling to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Roman Catholic educators have an extra challenge — trying to forestall a relentless wave of closures of their schools that has no end in sight. Already this year, financial and enrollment problems aggravated by the pandemic have forced the permanent closure of more than 140 Catholic schools nationwide, according to officials who oversee Catholic education in the country. Three of the nation’s...

Pope Leo XIII, born in 1810, is credited with being the founder of Catholic social teaching. (CNS/Library of Congress) By Carol GlatzCatholic News Service VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Going by the pseudonym "X," Pope Leo XIII anonymously crafted poetic puzzles in Latin for a Roman periodical at the turn of the 19th century. The pope created lengthy riddles, known as "charades," in Latin in which readers had to guess a rebus-like answer from two or more words that together formed the syllables of a new word. Eight of his puzzles were published anonymously in "Vox Urbis," a Rome newspaper...

What are we to make of the 20th Century? Like any period it is marked with its glories and its horrors. In his now classic work Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson gives a sober assessment of the 20th century and estimates, many think conservatively, that 100 million died in war and for ideological reasons in that violent century. Perhaps no century can be said to have been bloodier.It was a century of the imposition of every sort of collectivism from communism, fascism, tribalism, and socialism , all with catastrophic results. Whole populations were the subject of social experiments; and here...

A reader alerted me to an interesting and insightful analysis by Pope Leo XIII of three trends that both alarmed him and pointed to future problems. He wrote of these three concerns in 1893 in the Encyclical on the Holy Rosary entitled Laetitiae Sanctae (Of Holy Joy). The Pope enunciates these three areas of concern and then offers the mysteries of the Rosary as a necessary remedy. Lets look at how the Pope describes the problems and then consider too what he sees as a solution. His teaching is in bold, italic, black. My remarks are in plain text, red.There...