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His Most Profound Words

September 25, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on His Most Profound Words

By JOE SIXPACK Jesus said many wonderful, amazing, and profound things during His three-year public ministry. He said things no one had ever said before…anytime, anywhere. We twenty-first century Christians take the profundity of His words for granted. After all, we grew up hearing them, and they certainly didn’t seem all that profound when we were kids.Think about it, though. Jesus, this Jewish man roaming around Israel, told us that He is God. He told us He would give us His Body and Blood for the nourishment of our souls. This Jesus, who was from all appearances just another man, forgave sins. He told His apostles they could forgive our sins in His name. He told us we could do…Continue Reading

September Pall… Firestorms Spring Up Both In Forests And Politics To Threaten Ways Of Life

September 24, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on September Pall… Firestorms Spring Up Both In Forests And Politics To Threaten Ways Of Life

By DEXTER DUGGAN PHOENIX — As mid-September arrived, a pall covered the sky here from the mountains on the west — the direction where the overcast came from — to the mountains on the east. It wasn’t a congregation of individual clouds but unending gray above the peaks and deserts.It looked like the “marine layer” that California coastal residents are familiar with, called the “May gray” or “June gloom.” Just drive east a bit from southern California’s Pacific Ocean beaches toward the desert and it dissipates.However, this September aerial visitation was different and came all the way into Arizona. Phoenix is about a five-and-a-half-hour drive east of those beaches. This gray didn’t arise from a coastal temperature inversion but the…Continue Reading

The Christian Teacher In The Twenty-First Century… Why Morality And Education Are Bound Together

September 23, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on The Christian Teacher In The Twenty-First Century… Why Morality And Education Are Bound Together

By PAUL KRAUSE It is no secret that American education—and Western education, more broadly—is in the throes of a deep crisis.This crisis is mostly self-inflicted and, to some extent, largely modern. Yet even in the 1960s and into the 1980s education still transmitted the treasury of culture and cultural consciousness to the next generation. Then began the nihilistic chants and iconoclasm at Stanford: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”Education, as all honest people know, is not a neutral endeavor. Nor should we strive for a supposedly neutral educational outlook. The role that education plays in cultural transmission ought to be celebrated and defended. And precisely because of the role education plays in cultural inheritance, education was…Continue Reading

Beacon Of Light… Examination Of Conscience: The Third Commandment

September 22, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Beacon Of Light… Examination Of Conscience: The Third Commandment

By FR. RICHARD D. BRETON JR. (Editor’s Note: Fr. Richard D. Breton Jr. is a priest of the Diocese of Norwich, Conn. He is currently the parochial vicar of St. Andrew Parish in Colchester and St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Lebanon. He received his BA in religious studies and his MA in dogmatic theology from Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn.) + + Last week’s column revealed how we fail in living the Second Commandment. Today we will consider the Third Commandment which is: “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.” Jewish tradition refers to the Sabbath as from sunset on Friday evening to Sunset on Saturday. For Catholics, we observe the Sabbath as Sunday to recall…Continue Reading

The Debates Are Coming

September 21, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on The Debates Are Coming

By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD Next week the presidential campaign — for good or evil — moves into the debate stage. As you know, there will be three televised debates between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. They will start next Tuesday, September 29, followed by one October 15, and the third October 22. Between the first and the second there will be a vice-presidential debate on October 7 between current Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris.Debates have been part of the political tapestry of America since the beginning of the Republic but debating by presidential candidates is of relatively recent origin. One of the reasons is that during earlier times presidential candidates did not…Continue Reading

Dem Platform Backers . . . Deserve To Feel Plenty Guilty, But Let Innocent Make False Confessions

September 20, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Dem Platform Backers . . . Deserve To Feel Plenty Guilty, But Let Innocent Make False Confessions

By DEXTER DUGGAN Sellers that misrepresent their goods to gull buyers are an old — need we say biblical? — story. Who wants a basket of rotten apples fit for pigs when she expected them fresh for a pie? This is as old as Adam, Eve, and the apple-hawking serpent in the Garden.The Marxist-inspired Black Lives Matter violence organization prefers that you focus on its merely hawking justice. However, even its somewhat-sanitized website is candid about its goal to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement” as being inferior to “extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another,” and to “foster a queer affirming network.”“When we gather,” BLM’s What We Believe section continues, “we do so with the…Continue Reading

Confronting The Continuing Crisis

September 19, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on Confronting The Continuing Crisis

By CHRISTOPHER MANION In Veritatis Splendor, his 1993 encyclical, St. John Paul II echoes St. Paul, calling us to “obedience to truth” and to “turn to God from idols” (1 Thess. 1:9).The Latin title invokes “the brilliant, bright light of truth,” the Truth Who is Christ, the Light of the World.St. John Paul doesn’t mince words. He forcefully defends “fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine which, in the present circumstances, risk being distorted or denied,” not only in the culture but “within the Christian community itself” (emphasis in the original).“We are facing what is certainly a genuine crisis,” John Paul concludes.This chilling charge was written almost thirty years ago. Has the “Christian community” recovered in the years since?Unfortunately, the chaos has…Continue Reading

A Bundle Of Roses

September 18, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on A Bundle Of Roses

By JOE SIXPACK Queen St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231) was one of the most benevolent monarchs in the history of the world. Not content with receiving numbers of the poor in her palace on a daily basis, and relieving the distress of all whom she could find, she built several hospitals, where she served the sick and dressed the most horrible sores and infections with her own hands.Once she was carrying in the folds of her mantle some provisions for the poor when she met her husband returning from hunting with his friends. Amazed to see her struggling under such a heavy burden, he opened the mantle to see what she was carrying. He was even more amazed to find…Continue Reading

“Patron Saint Of Difficult Century”. . . Recalling St. Maximilian Kolbe, “Martyr Of Charity” To Nazis

September 17, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on “Patron Saint Of Difficult Century”. . . Recalling St. Maximilian Kolbe, “Martyr Of Charity” To Nazis

By DEXTER DUGGAN PHOENIX — Not many men have consented to be in selfies with those who later would have them executed, but that was one of the unusual events in the selfless life of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest and “martyr of charity,” as Pope John Paul II called him.Kolbe’s life was the topic of a September 5 talk by Bill Marcotte, assistant director of the Institute of Catholic Theology (ICT), an evangelization outreach based at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church here.Beginning a new season of programs with the arrival of September, the ICT conducted the talk by Zoom, as it had done at talks earlier this year when COVID-19 caused events around the nation to be…Continue Reading

In A Blaze Of Glory . . . The Blessed Sacrament Enthroned Above The Clouds

September 16, 2020 Frontpage Comments Off on In A Blaze Of Glory . . . The Blessed Sacrament Enthroned Above The Clouds

By JAMES MONTI The year was 1592. Pope Clement VIII was a man who felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. The Church was beset with troubles from all sides, with continuing civil war between Catholics and Protestants in France, the spread of heresy, the ever-present threat to Christian Europe from the Turks, and the bloody persecution of English and Irish Catholics living under the Protestant regime of Queen Elizabeth I.On November 25, 1592, Pope Clement issued an encyclical summoning the clergy and laity of Rome to undertake with him a spiritual crusade of prayer in the form of the Forty Hours Prayer, a forty-hour cycle of continual Eucharistic adoration which he asked each major parish of Rome…Continue Reading