Free Republic

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to get a straight answer out of City Hall about why voting records stored in an official city database showed that a parade of 22 dead people, led by Smokin' Joe Frazier, voted in past city elections. First, I tried emailing all three members of the Board of Elections, especially Al Schmidt, a Republican who briefly became a star on CNN by proclaiming the sanctity of the vote count in Philadelphia for the presidential election. But neither Schmidt nor his Democratic colleagues on the board ever responded.

White Double IT SEEMS FITTING that the Octave of the Princes of the Apostles should not end without the appearance on the sacred cycle of some, at least, of those brilliant satellites that borrow light from them, and continue their work throughout the course of ages. Twin stars this day arise on the heavens of holy Church, illumining by the radiant beams of their apostolate immense tracts of country. Seeing that they start from Byzantium; one is at first led to suppose that their evolution is going to be performed independently of the laws which Rome has the right...

White Double IT WAS RIGHT that the Church should honor, during these days devoted to the instruction of catechumens, the Pontiff whose very name suggests the zeal and knowledge which pastors ought to show in preparing candidates for baptism. He has long had a place in the Martyrology of the Western Church, but today, in addition to expressing our gratitude for what he did fifteen hundred years ago, we ask him for aid, which is as necessary now as it was in the first ages of Christianity. It is true that baptism is now administered to infants. The gift...

White Double “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” THESE WORDS, addressed to the serpent in the days which the Church now seeks to bring before the minds of her children, have dominated the world’s history. The woman, who was the first to fall victim to Satan’s deceits, was, in Mary, the first to rise. In her Immaculate Conception, in her virginal motherhood, in her offering of the new Adam to God on the mount of expiation,...

Let My People Go  Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic EqualityBy S. S. HasanOxford University Press. 320 pp. $49.95.Reviewed by Robert W. ShaffernSana Hasan, an Egyptian scholar best known for her Enemy in the Promised Land, has written another important book in Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt—a book in which she honestly confronts the sorry condition of Christians in Egypt, where the “problems faced by the Christian minority are for many . . . a taboo subject.” Hasan courageously describes the discrimination and harm often visited upon one of Christianity’s oldest communions—the Coptic...

After much hesitation, Priest Georgy Edelshtein decided to write a letter to the Russian president, a former KGB officer, about other KGB officers - Metropolitans Methodius and Cyril, the most likely aspirants for the post of patriarch (see MN No.19, 2003) Dear Mr. President, On September 26, 2002, Metropolitan Methodius of Voronezh and Lipetsk was awarded the Order of Friendship for "outstanding achievements and many years of conscientious work." On March 27, 2003 you presented the award to His Eminence in the Kremlin's Catherine Hall. Talking about all those present, including Metropolitan Methodius, you said that those people "have set...