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The Fortune Cookie Vs. The Great Books

May 26, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on The Fortune Cookie Vs. The Great Books

By DONALD DeMARCO The late Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, in his dissent from Obergefell v. Hodges, stated, “[We have] descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” No doubt, in the back of his mind Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words in the Casey decision still were ringing in his mind: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life.” Robert H. Bork, in his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, found these words to be meaningless and nothing more than an appeal “to a free-floating spirit of radical autonomy.” Needless to say, nobody’s right…Continue Reading

St. Pachomius: Monastic Pioneer

May 25, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on St. Pachomius: Monastic Pioneer

By RAY CAVANAUGH The product of a pagan household, St. Pachomius would emerge as a pioneer of communal monasticism, one of the most influential of Church traditions. May 9 is his feast day. He was born in the Thebaid region of ancient Egypt in the year AD 292. Though raised in an idolatrous home, from a young age he “had an aversion to the profane ceremonies used by the infidels in the worship of their idols,” according to Alban Butler’s The Lives or the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (volume 5). At age 20, Pachomius entered compulsory military service under the auspices of the Roman Empire, which then encompassed much of North Africa. While spending time at the city…Continue Reading

Analysis: “Vos Estis” And “Vulnerability”

May 24, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on Analysis: “Vos Estis” And “Vulnerability”

By ED CONDON (Wanderer Editor’s Note: We will have more commentary on this new sex abuse policy in the future. For now, we would like to highlight this observation from a May 9 Catholic World Report essay by Christopher R. Altieri: (“The role of the laity in the work of reform is another major question mark. Vos estis allows bishops and bishops’ conferences to enlist the assistance of willing and qualified lay persons, but does not mandate their involvement in receiving reports, investigating cases, or keeping the faithful and the broad public informed of investigators’ progress — or lack of it. (“For all his talk of clericalism being the root of the crisis in the Church — he’s not wrong…Continue Reading

A Book Review… “Knavish Imbecility”: A Great Study Of Bad Shepherds

May 23, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… “Knavish Imbecility”: A Great Study Of Bad Shepherds

By JEFF MINICK Bad Shepherds, by Rod Bennett, published by Sophia Institute Press, 2018; 148 pages. Order at www.sophiainstitute.com or call 1-800-888-9344. “The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight” — Hilaire Belloc, as quoted in Rod Bennett’s Bad Shepherds. + + + As a history major in college followed by two years of graduate study in medieval history, a teacher of history for twenty years, and a lifelong reader of history and biography, I can affirm that one of the greatest of Clio’s gifts is…Continue Reading

Pro-Infanticide Governor Called A Moderate

May 21, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on Pro-Infanticide Governor Called A Moderate

By BILL DONOHUE (Editor’s Note: Catholic League President Bill Donohue commented May 15 on how the media are covering a supporter of infanticide.) + + + Infanticide is the deliberate killing of infants, either by active or passive measures. In Nazi Germany, they preferred the former; in this country, we prefer the latter. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says it is okay to allow a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion to die unattended by hospital staff. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam agrees. The latest to agree is Montana Gov. Steve Bullock: He vetoed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act last week. The difference between these three men is that only Bullock is running for president; he announced…Continue Reading

Tariffs: The Taxes That Made America Great

May 20, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on Tariffs: The Taxes That Made America Great

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN As his limo carried him to work at the White House May 13, Larry Kudlow could not have been pleased with the headline in The Washington Post: “Kudlow Contradicts Trump on Tariffs.” The story began: “National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, contradicting President Trump’s repeated inaccurate claim that the Chinese foot the bill.” A free trade evangelical, Kudlow had conceded on Fox News that consumers pay the tariffs on products made abroad that they purchase here in the U.S. Yet that is by no means the whole story. A tariff may be described as a sales or consumption tax the consumer…Continue Reading

The Primacy Of The Spiritual

May 19, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on The Primacy Of The Spiritual

By DONALD DeMARCO I was visiting an elderly lady whose refrigerator had broken down. She pointed sadly to the ice-cube tray which contained little circumscribed pools of water. “That’s what keeps the fridge cold,” she said. It would have been inexcusably impolite to correct her on this point. Her thoughts of melted ice cream, soggy vegetables, and milk at room temperature no doubt created a disposition that was not going to be receptive to grasping a metaphysical point. She had, of course, confused the cause with the effect. It wasn’t the ice cubes that made the refrigerator cold, but something far more elusive. It was an old refrigerator and now it had given up the ghost. There was nothing more…Continue Reading

In China… Workers Making Apple IPhones Start At $3.15 Per Hour

May 18, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on In China… Workers Making Apple IPhones Start At $3.15 Per Hour

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY (Editor’s Note: Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor-in-chief of CNSnews.com. Creators Syndicate distributes his column. All rights reserved.) + + + The workers who assemble Apple iPhones make a starting wage of $3.15 per hour in the People’s Republic of China, according to The New York Times. “Apple has said the starting pay for workers at the world’s biggest iPhone factory, in Zhengzhou, China, is about $3.15 an hour,” the Times reported in a story published two weeks ago. That $3.15 per hour is less than half the U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. That means a teenager working part-time serving Big Macs at a McDonald’s in the American Midwest earns a far bigger hourly…Continue Reading

Pennsylvania Legislator . . . Acknowledges Aggression Toward Woman Praying At Planned Parenthood

May 17, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on Pennsylvania Legislator . . . Acknowledges Aggression Toward Woman Praying At Planned Parenthood

HARRISBURT, Pa. (CNA) — Brian Sims, a Pennsylvania state legislator who on May 2 confronted a woman praying outside Planned Parenthood, said in a video posted to social media May 7 that he was aggressive, and he reiterated his intention of “pushing back” against those who pray or protest outside abortion facilities. Sims had livestreamed a video May 2 in which he can be seen approaching a woman outside of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The woman, by herself, can be seen praying the rosary across the street from the Planned Parenthood. He aggressively questioned her for several minutes, and addressing livestream viewers he solicited the woman’s name and address, saying, “we’ll protest outside of her home. Let’s…Continue Reading

The First Fatima Apparition… The Power Of The Most Holy Rosary

May 16, 2019 Featured Today Comments Off on The First Fatima Apparition… The Power Of The Most Holy Rosary

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Part 2 This is the second article, of two, which examines Fatima in the light of Marian devotion. We can begin by looking at the power of the rosary historically in the Church. This power has been proved on numerous occasions down the centuries, but particularly at the time of the Battle of Lepanto, which took place in October 1571, when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of southern European Catholic states, fought against the main fleet of the Muslim Ottoman Empire near Lepanto, off western Greece. The reigning Pope, Pius V, called for Catholics to pray the rosary, and the result was a decisive victory by the Holy League which prevented the invasion…Continue Reading