Free Republic

With all the hullabaloo on this topic, I have tried valiantly to avoid having a knee-jerk opinion on altar girls. Now, however, I have actually spent some time thinking about it. And I do have an opinion, based on my personal experience both as a Catholic mother and REGINA’s Editor. I raised a son and a daughter in the Catholic Church in Connecticut in the 1990’s and 2000’s. My daughter had zero interest in being an altar ‘server’ and I was somewhat dubious about then-popular claims that serving the altar would somehow prepare her to have a successful career. In...

A priest resigned Tuesday on the same day the attorney of a former altar boy who claimed he was sexually abused by two priests filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese. The lawsuit claimed the boy, who once dreamed of being a priest, was abused by two priests when he attended summer camp at the St. Vincent De Paul church in Boynton Beach when he was 14 years old. "This boy was attending a camp that was designed to attract young kids who might be interested in the Catholic Church, interested in becoming priests," said the alleged victim's lawyer, Jeff Herman....

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Silently processing out of the sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica at 7 a.m. each day, the altar servers look like angels, but the women who cook and clean for them say they are normal boys. Well, maybe not totally normal. After all, these 11- to 18-year-olds live at the Vatican during the school year. During the 2005-06 academic year, 21 of them ate, slept, studied and occasionally created chaos at the St. Pius X Pre-seminary inside the Vatican walls. Father Enrico Radice, rector of the pre-seminary, said four students graduated from high school in June, and...

(I am a staunch conservative converted to the right by Rush Limbaugh. I remember the exact issue of my conversion - Limbaugh pointed out that so called cuts in federal spending were actually cuts in the growth of spending. Clinton's duplicity in using the words "spending cuts" insulted my sense of what defines honesty as did Clinton in general. But over the years I have become critical of talk show hosts. )In my opinion the best hosts are as follows; Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Hugh Hewitt, Denver's Mike Rosen and Laura Ingraham. Hosts that suffer by comparison include Sean Hannity,...

“I Was an Altar Boy” By: Keith A. Fournier © Third Millennium, LLC Last Friday night, along with millions of Americans and many others throughout the world, I watched the Presidential debate It was toward the end of this debate that a question was raised about the fundamental human rights issue of our age, the right to life, and the first freedom, the freedom to be born. When I heard candidate Kerry’s answer, I groaned with deep disappointment. “I was an altar boy…” the candidate proclaimed. He then went on to commit an act of sophistry, continuing his efforts to...