Free Republic

The queen consort of George V was consistent in her sense of duty and unswerving in how she expressed it. Crowned with dignity and corseted with confidence, at five feet six inches, Mary of Teck was the same height as the king, but they were called George the Fifth and Mary the Four-fifths. Of her many benefactions to Empire, not least, and perhaps most conspicuous, was her habit of removing climbing ivy from regal residences and public buildings. Her detestation of climbing ivy was a life-long obsession, quite the opposite of Queen AnneÂ’s love affair with boxwood. Even in...

And lo, it is written: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor thy neighbor’s seat… Unless that seat is being saved, apparently. Wayne Dodge, 51, was arrested Sunday following a violent row at a Mormon church that reportedly started over seat-saving. According to Deseret News, Dodge, a regular at the Meadows Ward LDS Church in Plain City, Utah, sat in a section of pews being reserved by a family who does not usually attend the ward. “There [were] some seats that were allegedly saved, and there was a disagreement over whether they were saved or not… This continued to...

<p>Three CD players hidden under a cathedral's pews blared sexually explicit language in the middle of an Ash Wednesday Mass, leading a bomb squad to detonate two of the devices.</p>

Worshipers were interrupted during an Ash Wednesday service at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis by a trio of hidden CD players spewing "pornographic" messages from beneath pews. Three CD players had been duct-taped beneath the pews and rigged to go off at 12:20 p.m., Santa Fe Police Capt. Gary Johnson said. An Ash Wednesday service was being conducted at the time, and Johnson said responding officers described the messages to him as pornographic, although he wouldn't go into detail about their content. The cathedral staff found and removed the three CD players, then called police while church-goers evacuated the...

ROME, JULY 20, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Fewer and fewer people attend Sunday Mass in Italy, or so they say. While Mass attendance has certainly dropped over the years, the image of Rome's nine hundred churches sitting empty is just plain wrong. Many local parishes have lively Mass attendance and work hard at keeping young people in and around the church. At my own church of the Protomartyrs, the 10 a.m. Sunday Mass is standing room only and the other five Masses throughout the day are well attended. The draw isn't the music, nor the coffee and doughnuts; it is the untiring...

Just got this off Pollingreport.com Shows only 1 pt bounce for Kerry! Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Oct. 1-3, 2004. N=1,002 registered voters nationwide (MoE ± 3.5); 801 likely voters (MoE ± 4). . "If the presidential election were being held TODAY, would you vote for the Republican ticket of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for the Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards, or for the ticket of Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo?" If "Other" or "Unsure": "As of TODAY, do you LEAN more to...