Free Republic

A socialist government official in Andalusia, Spain, called for a local Catholic bishop to be “muzzled” for arguing that men and women are both different and complementary. Bishop Demetrio Fernandez of Cordoba should be silenced for leveling attacks against “real and effective equality between men and women,” charged Miguel Angel Vazquez, a member of the Socialist Party and spokesman for the Andalusian provincial government. Read more: http://www.ewtnnews.com/catholic-news/World.php?id=6802#ixzz2HKHjM53m

A rabbi’s declaration that he is an “Islamaphobe” and an accompanying speech at a Tea Party forum in San Mateo earlier this month has been called racist and hateful by the state chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Rabbi Nachum Shifren and all the other candidates for U.S. Senate were invited to a candidate’s forum May 3 at the American Legion Hall in San Mateo, co-sponsored by the San Mateo County Republican Party and My Liberty, a local Tea Party group. Shifren told a cheering audience, “I am an Islamaphobe and everything we need to know about Islam, we...

The Bay Bridge reopened just after 9 a.m. today, six days after a repair job on a cracked structural beam on the eastern span fell apart and plunged onto the upper deck. Tests conducted overnight and this morning on an altered version of that repair job showed that the fix was holding, Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said. At 9:01 a.m., a fleet of five California Highway Patrol cars escorted the first private vehicles allowed onto the westbound upper deck since the span was shut down Tuesday evening. About 10 minutes later, the lower deck reopened for traffic heading to the...

A Pennsylvania history buff who recreates firearms from old wars accidentally fired a 2-pound cannonball through the wall of his neighbor's home. Fifty-four-year-old William Maser fired a cannonball Wednesday evening outside his home in Georges Township that ricocheted and hit a house 400 yards away. The cannonball, about two inches in diameter, smashed through a window and a wall before landing in a closet. Authorities say nobody was hurt.

SAN MATEO, Calif. (CBS) - An apparent pipebomb exploded Monday morning inside Hillsdale High School in San Mateo [California] but there were no injuries, according to authorities. Lt. Mike Brunicardi of the San Mateo Police Dept. said the person believed responsible for setting off the explosive device was in police custody and being questioned.

A federal appeals court has rejected a conservative group's attempt to take away federal funding from UC Santa Cruz on the grounds the school allowed protesters to interfere with military recruiters. The Young America's Foundation said some of its Santa Cruz members were unable to meet with Defense Department recruiters on campus from 2005 to 2007 because of student protests, including an April 2006 demonstration that caused Army and National Guard personnel to leave a university job fair.

ISLAMABAD: PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif and his brother have been placed under house arrest by the Pakistan government, according to reports. Tehreek-e-Insaaf chief Imran Khan has also been placed under house arrest, according to reports. Imran Khan was arrested in Rawalpindi. The Sharif brothers have been put under 3-day house arrest. The arrests come a day before the proposed long march. On Saturday, under mounting pressure from the United States and amidst escalating political standoff at home, Pakistan government had decided to challenge the disqualification of PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from contesting elections in a bid...

California druggist observes first anniversary of refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control, morning-after pill "We will celebrate on June 1st, 2008, our first year of conflict-free pharmacy," said Brent Watson, RPh., pharmacy director and owner of Central Coast Pharmacy Specialists, a compounding-only pharmacy in Templeton, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco in San Luis Obispo County. Watson defied big drug and insurance companies last year when the druggist announced his pharmacy would no longer take insurance or sell branded medications such as birth control pills and the morning-after pill. "It's not good medicine," said Watson.

Incense, bells, mysterious words intoned in an ancient language, congregation and priest moving gracefully in unison as they perform a 1,500-year-old ritual -- that was the old-style Catholic Mass. But when the Vatican decided to open up the Mass to improvisation in 1965, guitars replaced Gregorian chants, local languages replaced Latin, the priest faced the congregation rather than the altar and the entire Mass was simplified; a priest no longer made the traditional complicated series of scripted gestures during the Mass, nor did he wear elaborate old-style vestments. Some appreciated the more down-to-earth feel of the new Mass. Others mourned...

[SNIP] Documents obtained by the Weekly reveal that church officials have investigated an allegation of sexual abuse against Brown—yet Brown has never uttered a word on the matter. [SNIP] On July 3, 1997, a man we’ll call Larry (the Weekly doesn’t disclose the name of alleged sexual-abuse victims without their permission) wrote to the Diocese of Fresno stating, “I was sexually molested by Father Todd [sic] Brown when I was 12 years old in 1965,” while the future bishop served at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Bakersfield. [SNIP] He asked that the Diocese of Fresno “investigate the possibility that...

Vandals have attacked the train that takes Harrty Potter and his chums to wizard school in the blockbusteer movies. A teenage gang smashed at least 230 windows in the famous Hogwarts Express at Carnforth in Lancashire.Damage to the train was put at £50,000 by the operator, West Coast Railways. A spokeswoman said the thugs smashed through the toughened glass with hammers.

Joseph Ratzinger and Carlo Maria Martini were once considered the two great heavyweights of the College of Cardinals. Ratzinger has, of course, gone on to become Benedict XVI while Martini has long since stepped down as Archbishop of Milan. But their sometimes clashing views on doctrine are more relevant than ever to the future of the Catholic Church. The Pope has confirmed the Vatican's strictly traditional party line on questions of doctrine and moral theology. But his more progressive counterpart, the former Archbishop, has hardly disappeared. Officially, having stepped down from his Milan post in 2003 after reaching the prescribed...

A yawning gulf between the stern doctrines preached by Pope Benedict and the advice offered by ordinary Roman Catholic priests has been exposed by an Italian magazine which dispatched reporters to 24 churches around Italy where, in the confessional, they sought rulings on various moral dilemmas. One reporter for L'espresso claimed to have let a doctor switch off the respirator that kept her father alive. "Don't think any more about it," she was told by a friar in Naples. "I myself, if I had a father, a wife or a child who had lived for years only because of artificial...

** Snip ** Cambridge historian John Pollard, in his recent and superlative book, Money and the Rise of the Modern Papacy: Financing the Vatican 1850-1950, has shown that the papacy as we know it, that is, an institution exercising universal jurisdiction over a global flock, is a distinctly modern creation whose contemporary clout is due in large part to two major developments in the last 150 years: the "Peter's Pence" fund, skillfully exploited to get donations sent directly to Rome; and the Lateran Treaty of 1929, which at a stroke wiped out the Vatican's debt and gave it the freedom...

Oslo gay animal show draws crowds Curators say a Norwegian exhibition on homosexuality among animals has been well received, despite initial indications of strong opposition. The Oslo Natural History Museum opened the show last week and says it has been well attended, not least by families. Organisers reported early criticism of the project, and being told by one opponent they would "burn in hell". But there has been strong interest in an aspect of animal behaviour the museum says is quite common. It says homosexuality has been observed among 1,500 species, and that in 500 of those it is well...

I apologize for the vanity posting. I also apologize if this is already widely known. I just got done trying to create an E-Mail address on Microsoft's free "Hotmail" e-mail service. Before creating an e-mail address/user name, one is allowed to check and see if the address one would like to use is already taken. I tried several different addresses which contained various Conservative words, such as "loyal-patriot@hotmail.com", to see if they already existed. These were accepted by Hotmail with no problem. However, when I tried to use the word "American" as a part of an e-mail address, I received...

Lincoln Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz is getting a lot of national attention again because his is the only Roman Catholic diocese in the country that declined to participate in last year’s audit of compliance with the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The Diocese of Lincoln and the Melkite Eparchy of Newton, Mass., were the only Catholic jurisdictions in the United States that didn’t participate in the annual audit of compliance with guidelines on sex-abuse programs. In issuing the audit report March 30 for more than 170 dioceses and several eastern rite eparchies, Patricia O’Donnell Ewers, chairwoman of...

Waging Peace on Islam A missionary veteran of Asia proposes one way to defuse Muslim anger about the Crusades. Interview by Stan Guthrie | posted 05/05/2005 09:00 a.m. Months before the movie Kingdom of Heaven was to be released, critics lined up to lament how this big-budget film about the Crusades would set back Muslim-Christian relations, leading to a Muslim or Christian backlash, depending on whom you read. But it's not as if this movie is raising an issue long since dead. The question is not if the Crusades are a live memory for Muslims, but why? And how do...