Free Republic

The Church Fathers, A Door to Rome Nov/14/12 07:15 Many people have walked into the Roman Catholic Church through the broad door of the “church fathers,” and this is a loud warning today when there is a widespread attraction to the “church fathers” within evangelicalism. The Catholic apologetic ministries use the “church fathers” to prove that Rome’s doctrines go back to the earliest centuries. In the book Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, David Currie continually uses the church fathers to support his position. He says, “The other group of authors whom Evangelicals should read ... is the early Fathers of...

ROME - The Vatican is on alert in case of an attack by Islamist militants against the city-state or Pope Francis, but officials are not aware of any specific plot, the head of Vatican security said in a rare interview. "The threat exists. This is what has emerged from conversations with Italian and foreign colleagues," Domenico Giani told Polizia Moderna, the magazine published by Italian police, when asked if threats from Islamic State militants were credible. "(But) at the moment I can say that we are not aware of any plan to attack the Vatican or the Holy Father," he...

It's as famous for its flash cars as it if for its action scenes. So James Bond fans will delighted to learn that its impressive auto-mobiles were seen getting a serious spin on the set of the franchise's latest film, this week. Two vehicles - including Bond's Aston Martin - brought the Italian city of Rome to a standstill on Friday morning as filming continued to gather pace on Spectre. Film-makers shut part of Rome's historic city centre to create an iconic car chase scenes for the upcoming release. Fans looked on as stunt doubles raced 007's Aston Martin DB10...

The frescoes of the Santa Priscilla catacombs in Rome call our knowledge of the past into question and challenge the teachings of the Church. Amanda Ruggeri investigates. When archaeologists in Rome at the end of the 19th Century began to excavate the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla, they hoped to find treasure: intricately carved monuments and vibrant frescoes of the type found in other ancient, underground cemeteries. Instead, they found devastation.

The Islamist terrorist group ISIS is instructing Muslim sympathizers in Europe (and presumably the United States) to seek out leftist activists to form an “armed combat” alliance. The armed alliance against European governments will further ISIS’s goal to conquer Rome by 2020.The call to recruit leftists is in an eBook entitled Black Flags from Rome. The eBook is the subject of a two part report by Bridget Johnson at PJ Media. (Excellent reporting in both part one and part two.) While Western leftist groups like Obama funder group Code Pink , ANSWER , and ISM have given political support and...

An ISIS e-book on how to accomplish their caliphate goal of sacking Rome stresses enlisting “the Islamic State’s secret weapon = secret white converts” to take on Italy.Much of the book, “Black Flags from Rome,” is dedicated to laying out a case for why Muslims in Europe should rise up and assist ISIS from within, citing justifications for discontent from modern-day anti-immigration protests back to post-Ottoman creation of Muslim “ghettos.”The Rome title is one of a series disseminated online that includes Khorasan, Syria, Arabia and Persia, with a forthcoming “Black Flags from Palestine” title promised.It uses graphics from Pew...

ISIS is using a lot of strategies that they must have learned from Nathan Bedford Forrest. Upon reading history, the main tactics employed by Forrest were raw determination, speed, and deceit. ISIS does not have nearly the manpower the media here (which obviously delights in the killing) portrays. They don't have anything they claim to have. It's all a lie. Were we to have proper leadership (A general Sherman, for example) who could be turned loose on ISIS, it would all be over in a matter of weeks. As someone famously said, "You to have to kill enough of the...

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...

The government of Italy appears to be taking seriously the threats posed by the Islamic State (ISIS) to its nation. Italian officials said on Monday that they are considering sending 5,000 troops into Libya to combat the country’s burgeoning jihadist presence. In a recent video purportedly produced by the Islamic State’s Libya affiliate, the group slaughtered twenty-one Christians and vowed to seek out Rome as its next target. “And we will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our prophet, peace be upon him,” a North American English-accented militant leader said after his comrades slaughtered the Christian hostages. Italian...

President Theodore Roosevelt said, "Speak softly, and carry a big stick." More than a century later, President Barack Obama speaks loudly (and incessantly) and carries a twig. Like Nero of ancient Rome, Obama fiddles, takes selfies and does Internet interviews while the world burns. Is he trying to distract himself, or us? To use a sports analogy, is he trying to "run out the clock" and leave office before terrorist fires consume us? We have a president who is mismatched to the times in which we live. He is unserious when seriousness is required. The tyrants of the world...

"What is the Islamic State? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as...

Reflections on the United States’ Commander-In-Chief, on Presidents’ Day… During the summer of 1787, the member states of the United States of America sent delegates to Philadelphia, hoping that in this new convention, they could right the errors made in the construction of the Articles of Confederation. The nation was in an economic depression that had not ended with the peace signed in 1783, as many had expected. On the contrary, our currency was worthless, our borders were porous, our cargo was in jeopardy on the high seas, and our veterans were destitute at home. The delegates to the Constitutional...

Friday, October 08, 2010 The Late Development of the Bishop of Rome John Bugay has posted on Hermas and the structure of the early Roman church before. I don't have anything original to add to that discussion. However, I'd like to provide some corroboration by Roman Catholic scholars Raymond Brown and John Meier, whose book received both the Nihil Obstat and the Imprimatur (bold mine): There is no doubt that it [The Shepherd of Hermas] was written at Rome (Vis. 1.1.1.; 2.1.1; 4.1.2); and the suggestion that Clement would send it abroad (Vis. 2.4.3) may mean that Hermas' revelations had...

Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome. What's for dinner? You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat...

Let's pretend it is 56 B.C. and you have been fortunate enough to be invited to a party at the home of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, a great social coup. Piso, after all, was Julius Caesar's father-in-law and a consul of Rome... You need to prepare for pig. Archaeologists studying the eating habits of ancient Etruscans and Romans have found that pork was the staple of Italian cuisine before and during the Roman Empire. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice, although the rich, like Piso, got better cuts, ate meat more often and...

Gladiator games obviously are no longer going on in Rome. So when did they stop? We actually know the exact day: January 1st, A.D. 404. That’s 1611 years ago today. And it was because of a saint.

No visit to Rome is complete without a visit to the Pantheon, Trajan's Markets, the Colosseum, or the other spectacular examples of ancient Roman concrete monuments that have stood the test of time and the elements for nearly two thousand years... Working at ALS beamline 12.3.2, a superconducting bending magnet X-ray micro-diffraction beamline, the research team studied a reproduction of Roman volcanic ash-lime mortar that had been previously subjected to fracture testing experiments at Cornell University. In the concrete walls of Trajan's Markets, constructed around 110 CE, this mortar binds cobble-sized fragments of tuff and brick. Through observing the mineralogical...

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.(Galatians 4:4-5)Five centuries before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Daniel had a vision which showed him all of the Gentile rulers who would dominate the Jews until the end of the “Times of the Gentiles”. Daniel saw that the Babylonians, would be followed by the Persians, then the Greeks and finally, the Roman empire would prevail over Israel until the time of...

Eleven crew members and two passengers fell ill on a US Airways flight from Tel Aviv to Philadelphia on Saturday, causing it to make an emergency landing in Rome, AFP reported, quoting Italian media. According to the report, the crew members and passengers were suffering from red eyes and vomiting. A malfunction in the ventilation system of the plane could be to blame but no further information was available.