Free Republic

Does Jesus Forbid Self-Defense? Msgr. Charles Pope • June 18, 2018 • In daily Mass for Monday of the 11th Week of the Year, we read a passage from the Sermon on the Mount. It is a challenging text that raises many questions if read in a literal or absolute manner.You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone...

Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam Playwright David Mamet recently acknowledged that he had been profoundly influenced by Communist apostate Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 anti-Communist memoir, Witness. Mamet described how reading Chambers’s opus inspired “the wrenching experience” of forcibly reevaluating the way he thought, particularly his confessed leftist-herd co-dependence. Also, echoing the delusive herd mentality of the Left’s ad hominem attacks in the 1950s on Chambers — whose allegations of Communist conspiracies have been entirely vindicated with irrefragable documentation from the captured Soviet Venona cables — Congressman Peter King’s staid initial hearings of March 10, 2011, on American Muslim radicalization engendered similarly...

“A Different Kind of Righteousness” (Matthew 5:1-37)“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” So said Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Listen to that again: “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now this saying of Jesus assumes a couple of things: 1) that entering the kingdom of heaven is something to be highly desired; and 2) that it takes righteousness to enter it. So let’s start there, with those two points. First,...

Blessed Are the Pure in Heart May 19th, 2010 by Mark SheaA certain mindset which postmodernity finds very appealing identifies “purity” with sterility. To be “pure” is, in this view, to be uncontaminated, germ-free, barren, scrubbed, metallic. This mindset (which is actually very ancient) tends to think of “pure” spirituality as a spirituality unsoiled by contact with grosser elements such as matter and, most especially, with biological matter such as the human body with its wide variety of fluids, sticky viscous substances, mucus, feces, urine, blood, sperm, spit and sweat. Such a mindset found the Incarnation incredible and denied that...

Blessed Are Those Who Mourn April 21st, 2010 by Mark SheaThe second beatitude says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). I remember it like yesterday. The insistent kitchen phone was ringing on the other side of the wall as I woke. I had gone to bed exhausted with sorrow and fear the night before, having returned from the hospital where my Dad lay, snoring loudly in the depths of a coma. Just as my eyes opened, I heard my Mom pick up the phone and say, “Yes?” I held my breath and could hear...

President Barack Obama flies into the Mile High City today to sign a historic $787 billion economic stimulus bill at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Obama is scheduled to arrive this morning at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora. The Rocky's Judi Villa, Jerd Smith and Roger Fillion are blogging live.

If Europe wants to phone America on the Gaza crisis, who does it call? Not George Bush, who has two weeks left in the White House. And not Barack Obama, who has been mute on Israel’s military action, although the world looked to him immediately the conflict filled the screens. “Nobody at home in Washington”, ran one US headline on the turmoil. “President-elect Obama is closely monitoring global events, including the situation in Gaza, but there is one president at a time,” said Brooke Anderson, his chief national security spokeswoman. This is disingenuous. Even if silence is meant only as...