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Pandemic Prompts Painfully Predictable Palaver

May 9, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Pandemic Prompts Painfully Predictable Palaver

By CHRISTOPHER MANION Last week the USCCB announced the retirement of Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet. It was Bishop Conlon, we recall, who once chaired the conference’s Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People. In August 2012, he addressed the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha. After ten years of failed cover-ups, he was blunt. The bishops’ credibility was “shredded,” he told them. Bishop Conlon likened our own era to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.” While Bishop Conlon had once thought that the Charter, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around….I now know this was an illusion,” he told the group.…Continue Reading

The Most Urgent Moral And Social Issue

May 8, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on The Most Urgent Moral And Social Issue

Fr. FRANK PAVONE (Editor’s Note: Fr. Frank Pavone serves full-time as the national director of Priests for Life [EndAbortion.US], and pastoral director of Rachel’s Vineyard [RachelsVineyard.org] and the Silent No More Awareness Campaign [SilentNoMore.com].) + + + What is the most urgent social and moral problem we face? It is not immigration, or climate change, or terrorism. The most urgent issue is abortion. It has been so for a long time and remains so today, and this is true for various reasons which have not changed. First, there is nothing in America or in the world that is taking more lives than abortion. It claims more victims than any disease, natural disaster, war, or act of terror. Second, without life…Continue Reading

Historic Movie Illustrates Mistaken Belief . . . That Easy Contraception Won’t Lead To Permissive Abortion

May 7, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Historic Movie Illustrates Mistaken Belief . . . That Easy Contraception Won’t Lead To Permissive Abortion

By DEXTER DUGGAN The passage of time shows that a century-old silent movie intended to promote the availability of artificial contraception as the preferable alternative to abortion was wrong in its prognostication. As pro-life champions like the late sociologist Fr. Paul Marx, OSB, argued in the latter twentieth century, permissive contraception created the expectation that there’s a “right” to avoid pregnancy, and that when fallible contraception failed, permissive abortion was demanded as the backup. In turn, when permissive abortion is at hand — and its dangers are laughed off by pro-abortion media — there’s less incentive to use artificial contraception diligently in the first place. Longtime California pro-life activist and physicist Albin Rhomberg recently called attention to the 1916 silent…Continue Reading

Matrimony: The Longest Job I’ve Ever Had

May 6, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Matrimony: The Longest Job I’ve Ever Had

By JOE SIXPACK A Polish noblewoman, Katherine Jagiellonka, was the wife of Prince John Waza of Sweden. Prince John was imprisoned for life by his brother, King Eric. Katherine hurried to Stockholm immediately upon hearing of her husband’s imprisonment. “Your Highness, put me in prison with my husband,” she pleaded. The king replied, “But don’t you know your husband will never see daylight again?” “I know, Your Highness, but whether he’s innocent or guilty, John Waza will forever by my husband.” The king looked on her with pity. “It seems to me, dear lady, that from the moment your husband began his deserved sentence, your obligations to him ended.” Katherine took the ring from her finger, handing it to the…Continue Reading

The COVID-19 Threat To Freedom

May 5, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on The COVID-19 Threat To Freedom

By LAWRENCE P. GRAYSON The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of existence as we know it. The virus has led to a total disruption of our social, economic, and familial lives. Within a few weeks beginning in mid-February, shortly after the country’s first coronavirus cases were recorded, the U.S. economic boom that developed over the past three years was decimated. Millions of people lost their jobs, all nonessential businesses were shuttered, the stock market lost one-third of its value, and some 45,000 Americans had contracted the disease. A month later, the number of cases rose to over 600,000, taxing the health-care facilities of the nation, particularly in densely populated urban areas. This highly contagious disease has been indiscriminate —…Continue Reading

Stare Decisis And Roe

May 4, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Stare Decisis And Roe

By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD Stare decisis is a Latin term for the judicial policy of standing by settled points of law, “let the decision stand.” It is what a layman might refer to as precedent, and although it is slightly different, that difference is what one might refer to as a difference without a distinction. But both concepts boil down to the principle that courts try to decide cases as similar cases that contained the same questions of law were decided. The difference is in stare decisis once a court has enunciated a principle of law, it will adhere to it even when that particular point might later be questioned. The idea is that once a point of law…Continue Reading

Plans Quickly Upset Remind Us . . . Nothing On Earth Is assured, But Arrival Of Eternity Inevitable

May 3, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Plans Quickly Upset Remind Us . . . Nothing On Earth Is assured, But Arrival Of Eternity Inevitable

By DEXTER DUGGAN All those bustling, shoving, aggravating crowds we don’t see much of anymore on urban sidewalks and suburban freeways are starting to look pretty good as we reminisce in their absence. Oh, for us social animals to be among our familiar herds once again. As singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell musically lamented in the 1970s, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. We may not appreciate what’s right in our faces because of its excessive familiarity, but soon regret its slipping away. A noisy household can be unbearable until it’s empty-nester time. This isn’t the first global pandemic, but the first in history when it came so suddenly against everyone’s freedom, and we all could see the vacuum…Continue Reading

Beware The Swagger Factor

May 2, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Beware The Swagger Factor

By CHRISTOPHER MANION “The left takes its vision seriously — more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep” — Thomas Sowell. + + + A year ago, who would have dreamed that a policeman would arrest someone walking on a lonely beach, or a father playing with his daughter on the sidewalk outside their home? Or that a racist, pro-infanticide governor would order our bishops to bar Catholics from going to Mass for months on end? And that they would obey him? Yet, here we are, a year later, with millions of us willing to endure a strictly enforced home incarceration until we receive permission…Continue Reading

The Pell Verdict: Some Reflections

May 1, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on The Pell Verdict: Some Reflections

By JOHN YOUNG Interest in the Pell case is worldwide, and I have an added interest because I live in the city of Melbourne where the alleged offenses are supposed to have occurred. Reactions to the unanimous verdict by the Australian High Court to free Cardinal Pell are as one could have predicted. Those who always believed him innocent have rejoiced; those who always thought him guilty have, for the most part, either continued to think so or have refused to concede that they were wrong. Some have taken refuge in the excuse that the High Court found him “not guilty,” but not “innocent.” The fact, of course, is that there is no judicial verdict of innocent: An accused is…Continue Reading

For A New Missionary Age: We Need Saints Like Catherine of Siena

April 30, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on For A New Missionary Age: We Need Saints Like Catherine of Siena

  By DEACON KEITH FOURNIER In an age collapsing under the weight of sin and wandering aimlessly without a moral compass, we need holy women and men to be raised up to shake the Church and bring conversion to a world waiting to be born again. We need saints. Saints put legs on the Christian faith. Our age is an age with no real heroes. Saints are heroes of the faith and they need to be held up high once again! They inspire us, no matter what our state in life or vocation. They need to be imitated, as they imitated Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 4:16). Saints are a gift for the whole Church. They remind us that the Risen…Continue Reading