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15 Apr 2006 A five-year-old girl, Kai Leigh Harriott, wheelchair bound after a bullet paralyzed her three years ago, forgave the man who shot her and told him what he had done to her was wrong. She did this to his face, in court. After breaking down and crying, the girl picked up a glass of water, took a sip, and said to Anthony Warren ‘What you done to me was wrong…..but I still forgive him.' Anthony Warren had pleaded guilty to shooting her, shots that paralyzed the girl. Kai Lee Harriot used to be able to walk. She had...

by Br. James Brent, O.P. Other Articles by Br. James Brent, O.P. Reasons for Confession 04/12/06 Lent is an especially good season for Confession. It is also a good time to review the reasons why Catholics go to Confession. In This Article...The Divine MercyThe Chosen InstrumentMeeting Christ The Divine Mercy On the evening of Easter, Jesus appeared to His Apostles and said, “‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent Me, even so I send you.’ And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of...

<p>In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.</p> <p>O most merciful Jesus, with a contrite heart and penitent spirit, I bow down in profound humility before Thy divine majesty. I adore Thee as my supreme Lord and Master; I believe in Thee, I hope in Thee, I love Thee above all things. I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, my Supreme and Only Good. I resolve to amend my life, and although I am unworthy to obtain mercy, yet the sight of Thy holy cross, on which Thou didst die, inspires me with hope and consolation. I will, therefore, meditate on Thy sufferings, and visit the stations of Thy Passion in company with Thy sorrowful Mother and my guardian angel, with the intention of promoting Thy honor and saving my soul.</p>

La Shawn writes at her corner that a group called Soulforce has organized a 51-day tour of Christian and other conservative colleges on "Equality Rides" to equate phony homosexual "civil rights" with the struggle for blacks to win real civil rights back in the 1960s. Soulforce claims that: [l]ike the Freedom Rides of the 50's and 60's, the Equality Ride is a student-led effort that takes young adults into epicenters of intolerance and oppression to make a better tomorrow. In going on this journey, the Equality Riders draw inspiration from those Freedom Riders over forty years ago. I'm 45 years old and white, so...

Jesus said that we should pray to the Father saying (in part): “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Our ability to forgive men of their trespasses against us is significant to the salvation of our souls. Sadly, there are some that call themselves brethren, but they reject the idea of forgiving their brethren of sins that have been confessed and repented of. We cannot expect God to forgive us of our sins if we do not forgive the sins of others. A question from Peter to our Lord spawned a fascinating revelation: “Then came...

SEOUL, South Korea - Disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-suk asked forgiveness Thursday from fellow South Koreans for his fraudulent claims of human stem cell breakthroughs, but blamed the scandal on junior researchers who he said deceived him. Hwang, in his first public appearance in nearly three weeks, continued to insist he has the technology to use cloning to create human embryonic stem cells genetically matched to patients — saying he could do so in six months if he had access to enough human eggs. Seoul National University, where Hwang is a professor, issued investigation results Tuesday saying he fabricated landmark claims...

Shortly after Michael and Cathryn Borden of Lititz, Pa., were slain by their daughter's boyfriend (David Ludwig), family and clergy – at least those who presented themselves to the media – indicated their readiness to forgive little Lizzie, I mean Kara Borden. Forgiveness at least implies some acknowledgment of wrongdoing. The media, for the most, wouldn't even impugn the girl. After the shootings, Borden hopped into her beau's get-away car. She told him she wanted to "get as far away as possible, get married and start a new life." Only after Borden was confronted with surveillance cameras did she confess...

As Jesse Jackson visits Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at the presidential palace to denounce assassination and what he calls the ‘Rumsfeld-Robertson connection’, outside in the streets - violent protests have engulfed Caracas in a sign of Chavez’s tightening grip on power. El Universal has the story in Spanish here and Globovision has the story in Spanish here. Miguel explains it in English for us here.

In an incredible act of forgiveness, the Long Island woman whose face was shattered when a 20-pound turkey was thrown through her windshield came face-to-face yesterday with the prankster who did it — and hugged him tightly as they both broke down in sobs. Minutes earlier, Ryan Cushing, 18, had pleaded guilty to the Nov. 13 nightmare stunt that left Victoria Ruvolo, 44, critically injured. His plea was part of a deal that the big-hearted Ruvolo engineered, sparing the teen a possible 25 years in prison and instead landing the boy only six months in a local jail. As the...

Please give me a moment of time so I can tell you about an extraordinary opportunity save the lives of hundreds of children, and also further a movement forgiveness that could have a ripple effect around the world and through generations in Muslim - Christian relations. An extraordinary calling has been rippling through the network of Sudanese Christian immigrants in the US to bring relief to their former persecutors, the Muslims of the Darfur region of Sudan. "They burned our home, and they killed all my family, but I know God would have me come to their aid, even if...

I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, 'Thou shaft love thy neighbour as thyself.' Because in Christian morals 'thy neighbour' includes 'thy enemy,' and so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies. Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be...

Why don't Catholics go to confession any more — or, more precisely, why do so many go so seldom? Here is an old problem that doesn't seem to be getting better. Evidently we need to dig deeper into its causes and solutions. In a book-length interview called God and the World (Ignatius Press, 2002), Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — acknowledged that the "misuse of guilt feelings" can occur. But something even worse, he said, was "to extinguish the capacity for recognizing guilt." The Nazis sought systematically to do that. Are we once again reaching that point?...

When the feds quickly announce they won't press charges against runaway-bride Jennifer Wilbanks, 32, when the Albuquerque police chief discusses the "stress that she's been through" and law enforcement in Georgia is still noodling over whether to prosecute her for staging a kidnapping that didn't happen, you know you live in a country where actions mean nothing. Don't get me wrong: There have been serious consequences to Wilbanks' apparently premeditated hoax -- she bought her bus ticket a week before running off, and left behind her keys, wallet and ring, which made her disappearance look like a kidnapping, or worse....

A talk delivered at the Annual Assembly of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Western America, St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, San Diego, California, February 28, 2003 Offenses as Blessings If looked at in the right way, the offences that come to us are actually blessings in disguise. They offer us an opportunity to forgive and thus receive God's blessings and Grace. As St. Ignatius Brianchaninov affirms, "All the sorrows and sufferings caused us by other people never come to us except with God's permission for our essential good. If these sorrows and troubles were not absolutely necessary for us, God...

THE POPE WHO TURNED ANTISEMITISM ASIDE By Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe Thursday, April 7, 2005 http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/07/the_pope_who_turned_anti_semitism_aside/ As a young boy in the 1930s, my father attended public school in Snina, a town in eastern Czechoslovakia. Twice a week, a Catholic priest would come in to teach the catechism, during which the few children who were Jewish were sent to wait outside. As they left the classroom, my father recalls, the priest invariably made some insulting remark about the Jewish people. For Jews in the Europe of my father's youth, such Christian contempt was a fact of life. Its origins...

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca, who gravely wounded Pope John Paul in a failed assassination attempt in 1981, was grief-stricken over the Pontiff's death, Agca's brother said Sunday. Agca, now in an Istanbul prison, was mourning the loss of "a great friend," the gunman's brother Adnan Agca told Reuters. "He is extremely saddened, he is in grief. He loved the Pope," said Adnan Agca. "They developed a personal friendship while Mehmet Ali was (imprisoned) in Italy, and they had announced their brotherhood. "The Pope showed my brother and the rest of our family closeness. He was a...

John 20: 1-16 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have put him!”So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the...

She went out for cigarettes. That's my favorite detail of the story of Elizabeth Ashley Smith. This was not a noble calling; it wasn't even a noble errand. But the craving for nicotine at 2 o'clock in the morning led Smith into the loaded gun of one Brian Nichols, a man who had already raped one woman and murdered four men. Acccording to Smith, Nichols forced her into her apartment, tied her up, put her in the bathtub and told her "I'm not going to hurt you if you just do what I say." What would you do under those...

Today, as Good Friday looms tommorow with another innocent victim being crucified by a mob on the liberal's cross of "laws" (that a hate-filled judge says can be ignored) and "laws" (that a hate-filled judge says can be ignored "must" be followed to the letter. The media is promoting her death, and is ignoring contrary news and information. That, we may not be able to overcome. But the publicisn't the only Witness to this murder. So, while she is being slowly starved to death to "preserve" our rights to abortion, hatred, revenge, pride, and to conceal previous assaults, let us...

Patron Saints of Desperate, Forgotten, Impossible or Lost Causes Saint Philomena Martyred at about age 14 in the early days of the Church. In 1802 the remains of a young woman were found in the catacomb of Saint Priscilla on the Via Salaria. It was covered by stones, the symbols on which indicated that the body was a martyr named Saint Philomena. The bones were exhumed, cataloged, and effectively forgotten since there was so little known about the person. In 1805 Canon Francis de Lucia of Mugnano, Italy was in the Treasury of the Rare Collection of Christian Antiquity (Treasury...