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Here’s a post for our Catholic friends. Apparently the Popester has super miraculous turn-dried-blood-fresh powers in his lips because that’s the unnatural act he committed after chowing down with the gays and the transgenders.Watch below: More on his lunch date: While on a visit to Naples, Italy, Pope Francis visited the Giuseppe Salvia Detention Center in Poggiorale, outside of Naples. According to the Religion News Service, the pope insisted on the visit including lunch with inmates, though it was not on his original schedule. Around 90 inmates, randomly chosen by lottery, attended the lunch, and that group included 10 inmates...

This is what most of us know about the death of Julius Caesar, half-remembered from movies and plays: Some soothsayer said, "Beware the Ides of March." A few idealistic Romans decided to win back Rome for the people.Caesar got stabbed by Brutus with a big sword, said "Et tu, Brute?" and died nobly. All of that is wrong.

People need to examine whether the faith they claim is really Biblical.

Carabinieri Captain Lorenzo Iacobone said Monday two tourists from California, ages 21 and 25, were picked up Saturday for carving their names eight centimeters (three inches) high into an upper level of the Colosseum. They were freed later but will face trial for aggravated damage to a monument. Iacobone said the young women apologized for the vandalism, but he said such acts "are extremely serious, and no one considers the damage they are creating."

I apologize for the delay in posting these, but I thought it was important to give Dom Alcuin’s recent piece some extra time as our top story. We’ll get caught up with Agnese’s visits to the Station Churches by the end of this week. It is edifying to see how much more effort has generally been put into these celebrations in recent years, but the church of San Vitale (Friday of the Second Week of Lent) deserves special notice this year, as you can see by clicking the “Continue reading...” link ans scrolling down. Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent -...

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...