Free Republic

Pell And Neumayr - Their Suspicious Deaths Cardinal George Pell passed away ten days ago, on January 10, 2023. He had only been released a short while ago while unjustly imprisoned on rather trumped-up charges. Just before his death, the Spectator published what is now His Eminence's final article dealing with the working document for the upcoming "Synod on Synodality". He had some choice, accurate words to say about the 45-page bloviation. To wit:"What is one to make of this potpourri, this outpouring of New Age good will? It is not a summary of Catholic faith or New Testament...

Biden’s Counterfeit Catholicism The prospect of an anti-Catholic Catholic presidency Journalist George Neumayr's new book, The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?, debunks the myth that Joe Biden is a moderate candidate, detailing how Biden's policies have only become more radical over the years.  The following excerpt is focused on how Biden's platform stands against the teachings of the Church: Neumayr calls Joe Biden's Catholicism "counterfeit," based in part on Biden's radical stance on abortion, particularly with his reversal on the Hyde Amendment.Perhaps more priests should follow Church law and ban Joe Biden from Communion.Biden's faith and voting record...

The Pope’s Pitiful Reign of Error The upcoming Pan-Amazon Synod is shaping up to be a disaster of historic proportions I picked up a copy of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper which reads less like a Catholic periodical than a back issue of the Nation. The sheer BS and left-wing propaganda of its contents are stunning: “Climate Change is a Challenge for Society as a Whole” (that was its front-pager); “The Theology of the Noun” (called the “Holy Father’s extemporaneous discourse,” which is too impenetrably flaky to even summarize); “The Green Alphabet of Pope Francis”; “Protect Forests to Ensure...

An excerpt from George Neumayr’s new book, “The Political Pope.” The election of a liberal Jesuit to the papacy thrilled Democrats in the United States, whose unholy alliance with the Catholic left goes back many decades. Barack Obama, one of the pope’s most prominent supporters, has long been a beneficiary of that alliance. The faculty at Jesuit Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., ranked as one of the top donors to his campaign. In a grim irony, Obama, whose presidency substantially eroded religious freedom in America, rose to power not in spite of the Catholic Church but because of it. The...

Liberalism, as an experiment against common sense, undermines every institution it touches, including financial ones. In the age of political correctness, the conservatism of the banking industry was bound to give way to mindless multiculturalism and Great Society babble. Tried-and-true lending principles were deemed illiberal and imprudent loans became a form of "progress." Whatever the area that falls under it -- whether it is banking or education -- liberalism's regulatory regime consists of forcing people to adopt ideological goals which defy rationality: banks are told not to insist on such outmoded tests as good credit; schools are told not to...

January 18, 2006, 8:25 a.m. No Controlling Legal Authority Democrats diss the Constitution. By George Neumayr The greatest threats to the Constitution come from the Democrats who rise to defend it the loudest. Both Judge Alito's Supreme Court nomination hearings in the Senate and Al Gore’s faux-momentous ramblings Monday at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. display the Democrats’ perverse insistence that they represent the wall protecting the integrity of the Constitution. This is an absurdly grand claim for them to make since ignoring the Constitution as written is the de facto policy of the Democratic party. Hence the Democrats' endless...

Arnold Schwarzenegger's selection of archliberal Susan Kennedy, a former Cabinet secretary to Gray Davis, as his new chief of staff "is the last straw for a lot of grassroots California Republicans," says California Republican Assembly president Mike Spence to TAS. Spence describes the appointment as the equivalent of "George Bush appointing Howard Dean to be his chief of staff." Even the jaw of George Skelton (the Los Angeles Times columnist who has spent much of his career telling the California GOP to move left) dropped after the appointment of Kennedy, who is one of the state's leading abortion proponents, a...

The difference between Randy "Duke" Cunningham and many of his Congressional colleagues is one of degree, not kind. He is an extreme manifestation of a corruption pervasive in Congress, a crookedness that spreads with the size of the federal government. Had Cunningham just waited a little while and become a defense firm lobbyist, he could have received his Rolls-Royce, yacht, and Louis-Philippe commode legally. In Washington, D.C., cause and effect are never examined honestly. Politicians are expert at bemoaning a troubling effect even as they deepen its cause. So while the Democrats crank up their "culture of corruption" campaign and...

In an interview with a German newspaper late last year, Arnold Schwarzenegger urged the GOP to adopt more liberal stances, identifying that as the key to a winning political formula. "The Republican party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle," the newspaper quoted him as saying. "I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center. This would immediately give the party 5% more votes without it losing anything elsewhere."...

The liberals of Europe -- those champions of free-ranging Voltairean speech and scourges of fanatical religion -- are dragging journalist and author Oriana Fallaci into court for writing a book critical of militant Islam. Fallaci, who now lives in Manhattan, has been ordered to stand trial in her native Italy for The Force of Reason, a 2004 book which a mau-mauing Muslim activist has managed to convince an Italian judge skates too close to a law prohibiting "outrages against religion." Can Catholic activists in Italy invoke this law too? If so, the critics of Fallaci would find themselves in court...

In 1999, a teenager broke the story of Deep Throat's identity as W. Mark Felt in a high school history term paper. He got a B on it. Or "something ridiculous like that. The teacher is...an idiot in my opinion," said Chase Culeman-Beckman to the Journal News of New York in 1999. How did he figure it out? Chase Culeman-Beckman had attended a posh Long Island summer camp with Carl Bernstein's son Jacob roughly a decade earlier and had heard Jacob (then all of 8) popping off learnedly about "Mark Felt" as Deep Throat. "We entered into a very precocious...

St. Peter's in Chains By George Neumayr Published 4/7/2005 12:09:23 AM As secularization picked up speed in the 18th and 19th century and went into overdrive in the 20th, modern liberals militated to secularize and control everything, including the Catholic Church, which they regarded as the only cultural obstacle left to surmount. Enlightenment dilettante Denis Diderot spoke of strangling the last priest with "the guts of the last king." The Church had smelled a rat before the French Revolution. Pope Pius VI warned that the misnamed "Enlightenment" would destroy Europe's God-centered culture, decimate its moral foundations, and turn government into...

Elite journalists promised not to invest any faith in exit polling in this election. But they did. In the tank for Kerry all along, they took great heart from ill-informed pro-Kerry buzz early in the day based on exit polling. But results in Florida exposed the early reports as flaky conjecture, and as they did, the press corps looked quite hurt that exit pollsters had dashed their hopes again. Republicans will hold the House, Senate, and White House. Yet reporters said ad nauseam that the country is "divided." Apparently not. What does all this talk of division really add up...

The Corrections section in the New York Times on Tuesday contained some weighty admissions of error. One correction was that the Times had spelled the first name of Barbara Genther "Barbra." Another correction was that a weather report "listed incorrect times in the section headed 'Sun, Moon and Planets.' The correct times were one hour later than those shown." As Times ombudsmen tended to these consequential corrections, the paper's editorial writers used its now-discredited Monday story on missing explosives in Iraq to slander George Bush's military as incompetents who couldn't guard 380 tons of explosives. No, Jayson Blair hasn't been...

Outrage at obscene photos would be a little easier to take from liberal senators if they didn't have a history of financing them. Had Robert Mapplethorpe snapped the photos at Abu Ghraib, the Senate might have given him a government grant. Jesse Helms would certainly be surprised at the moral horror on display these days in the Senate. In 1989, he asked his fellow senators to stop funding degrading photography coming out of the National Endowment for the Arts. They refused. "I'm going to ask that all the pages, all the ladies and maybe all the staff leave the chamber...

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is provoking religious slights -- on Christians. Diane Sawyer's Primetime interview with Gibson dripped with an insulting condescension toward Christianity, a condescension liberals would regard as bigoted were it aimed at Judaism or Islam. Sawyer, brows furrowed, looking almost in a state of physical pain, felt free to question Gibson's faith with a surely-you-can't-believe-that? air. As Gibson spoke about such things as his belief in the Devil and the Holy Spirit, Sawyer's face registered a wincing incredulity. She looked like a horrified anthropologist who had just stumbled upon some grotesque religious sect. After...

John Kerry has addressed intern issues before -- Bill Clinton's. "I don't think it's that huge," Kerry said about Clinton's perjury during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "In fact, on one issue of perjury it's a question of whether one additional portion of the body was touched over another. I mean, is that huge?" Kerry inserted himself into the Impeachment proceedings as a kind of mediator between the Clinton White House and Congress, which a Boston Globe story from 1998 found "odd" since Kerry at the time was "neither an acknowledged party leader nor is he regarded as any great ally...