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What a frightening prospect is the destiny of the backslider! Yet even for the worst of us sinners, God offers hope. A foolish old farmer, so the story goes, concluded one day that the oats he had fed his mule for years were simply costing him too much.  So he hatched a plan: He mixed a little sawdust in with the feed, and then a little more the next day, and even more the next, each time reducing the amount of oats in the mix. The mule didn't seem to notice the gradual change, so the farmer thought things were...

Between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. — and sometimes as early as 4:00 — Pope John Paul II would arise each morning, keeping virtually the same schedule he had as the bishop of Kraków. Although he enjoyed watching the sunrise, the main reason for his early start was to make time for prayer. He prayed the Rosary prostrate on the floor or kneeling, followed by his personal prayers, and would then go to the chapel in order to prepare for 7:30 Mass. According to his press secretary, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, his sixty to ninety minutes of private prayer before Mass were the...

Christ's temptation and oursFATHER GEORGE WILLIAM RUTLERChrist was tempted three times as an act of love to prepare his Church for three temptations which would assault her in every generation. The Spirit that "drove" Jesus into the desert to be tempted by Satan (Mark 1:12) is the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the bond of love between God the Father and God the Son. Christ was tempted three times as an act of love to prepare his Church for three temptations which would assault her in every generation.Satan tested Christ to figure out if he truly was...

As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools. A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times...

Catholic Sources and the Declaration of IndependenceREV. JOHN C. RAGER, S.T.D.The American Declaration of Independence, which is so admirable and dignified an expression of the American mind, is at the same time an accurate expression of the Catholic mind, medieval and modern. The general historical background, which projected the American Declaration of Independence, is well known. There has been much discussion, however, concerning the parentage, direct and indirect, of the political principles that make the American Declaration what it is, “that most wonderful work ever struck off at a given moment by the hand and purpose of man.” Two facts...

In November 2003, Raymond Burke, then the bishop of LaCrosse, Wis., instructed priests in his diocese to deny Communion to three politicians unless they publicly recanted their pro-abortion rights positions, an action some Catholic scholars say is tantamount to excommunication. Since then, Burke's supporters have increasingly pointed to what they see as parallels with another case, and another moral hero, from 40 years ago. In the wake of the United States Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Joseph Francis Rummel, Archbishop of New Orleans, began planning the integration of the archdiocese's schools. It would take eight years,...

Prudence: Mother of All VirtuesFR. WILLIAM SAUNDERSI keep hearing about the importance of virtue and being virtuous, but no one explains what virtue is. Why don’t you do a column about this? St. Paul, in his Letter to the Philippians, captured the idea of virtue and the living of a virtuous life: "My brothers, your thoughts should be wholly directed to all that is true, all that deserves respect, all that is honest, pure, admirable, decent, virtuous or worthy of praise" (4:8). With this in mind, the classic definition of virtue is a habit or firm disposition that inclines a...

I believe there's a God, and while it is legendarily difficult to pronounce on such questions, I believe he lives in Texas or Fort McMurray. It's one or the other. I'm driven often to the Bible, both for its wisdom and its prose. Strange that the only text that seriously can be said to rival Shakespeare in trenchancy and power of expression should be a work primarily of religion, not literature, a compound book by many authors and, for English readers, a work of translation as well. The King James Bible is the only -- as we say these days,...

An international gathering of scholars this summer examined the theory that playwright and poet William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. MANCHESTER, England - It is early in the Protestant Reformation, and a time of fierce persecution of Catholics in England. Every Catholic faces the same questions: Will I rise up against the Queen if required? Will I become a martyr if given the chance?  If a group of English scholars are right, one Catholic poet summed up the dilemma nicely:“To be or not to be, that is the question.Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and...

Cardinal James Stafford reflects on how dissenters to Humane Vitae tore the Church apart -- and how that rift left scars that remain to this day. "Lead us not into temptation" is the sixth petition of the Our Father. Peirasmòs, the Greek word used in this passage for 'temptation,' means a trial or test. Disciples petition God to be protected against the supreme test of ungodly powers. The trial is related to Jesus's cup in Gethsemane, the same cup which his disciples would also taste (Mk 10: 35-45). The dark side of the interior of the cup is an abyss....

President Obama continued his effort to reclaim religion for progressive politics in general, and his Democratic Party in particular. In recent decades, the Republicans have become the religion party in the United States. While Obama did make gains among religious voters, religious practice is still one of the most powerful predictors of voting behaviour: The more often you attend religious services, the more likely you are to vote Republican.It is not necessary that this should be the case, for there is a long history of religious movements on the left. The "social gospel" movement in both Canada and the...

It is tragically ironic that the most vital and profound issue facing this country is considered by many of its citizens and most of its establishment to be at best irrelevant and at worst a dangerous digression championed by zealots. The issue is, of course, abortion. And Canada is almost unique in the civilized world in having no abortion law at all. In other words, any unborn child can be aborted and in most of the country the taxpayer will finance the procedure.  Can we, however, genuinely regard ourselves as part of a "civilized world" if we treat our most...

The key imprint of George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, is its sadness. There is the sadness of Dorothea, the heroine, led by guileless idealism into a loveless marriage with the desiccated scholar, Edward Causabon. Eliot's craft is to present the Reverend Causabon, who in a less skillful writer's hands would have been a repellant bore, as a figure of much melancholy affect.  Causabon's relentless and sterile quest to write a universal book, the chimera of The Key to All Mythologies, first strikes the reader as vain and, then, as simply sad. Eliot's artistic triumph was to place Causabon and his mania...

The Catholic Church and the Creation of the UniversityThe Church played a central if not exclusive role in the establishment and encouragement of theuniversity. The substantial output of medieval scholarship that was produced in the twentieth century should have put this inane caricature to rest once and for all, but here we have another case of specialized knowledge that hasn’t managed to trickle down to the general public.  It was, after all, in the High Middle Ages that the university came into existence. The university, which developed and matured at the height of Catholic Europe, was a new phenomenon in...

Should laws against assisted suicide be rescinded as "paternalistic?" Should assisted suicide be transformed from what is now a crime (in most places) into a sacred "right to die"? Should assisted suicide be redefined from a form of homicide into a legitimate "medical treatment" readily available to all persistently suffering people, including to the mentally ill?   According to Brown University professor Jacob M. Appel, the answer to all three of these questions is an unequivocal yes. Writing in the May-June 2007 Hastings Center Report ("A Suicide Right for the Mentally Ill?"), Appel argues in that assisted suicide should not only...

There is a wonderful letter in which St. John Bosco advised his priests to avoid anger in their dealings with the foster children they cared for. St. John Bosco 1815-1888 He had founded a religious congregation, the Salesians, to care for homeless boys, so he and his priests certainly had plenty of unruly behavior to contend with, and plenty of opportunities to flare up in anger. But in his letter St. John Bosco tells his priests, "They are our sons, and so in correcting their mistakes we must lay aside all anger and restrain it so firmly that it is...

The debate over embryonic stem cell research continues to escalate in our country, and remains a topic of significant public interest. Because of this growing public interest, I am often invited to participate in public debates on stem cell research and cloning. My sparring partners are usually other scientists, politicians, or public policy experts. The debates are typically held at universities or colleges, and audiences generally have the opportunity to ask questions of both sides afterwards.  Having participated in a number of these debates over the past few years, I've been surprised by how often certain arguments are trotted out...

When James Madison agitated to make religious freedom fundamental to the United States Constitution, it was not from hostility to religion. It was from hostility to established religion, with its presumption of an authority in worldly affairs that only an elected government should exercise. James Madison (1751-1836) The first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights tells us that Congress shall "make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" — a rule that is just as important in its second half as in its first.  However, the free exercise of religion involves living by...

Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia...

The green fervour Is environmentalism the new religion?Joseph Brean, National Post Published: Saturday, February 10, 2007 In his new book Apollo’s Arrow, ambitiously subtitled The Science of Prediction and the Future of Everything, Vancouver-based author and mathematician David Orrell set out to explain why the mathematical models scientists use to predict the weather, the climate and the economy are not getting any better, just more refined in their uncertainty. What he discovered, in trying to sketch the first principles of prophecy, was the religious nature of modern environ-mentalism. This is not to say that fearing for the future of...