A Potpourri… Women’s Rights, The Sexual Revolution, And The Jesuits

By GEORGE A. KENDALL

Not long ago, I saw a headline on the Internet, indicating that Pope Francis is calling for the Church to support women’s rights. I can hardly object, because the Church has a duty to support everyone’s rights in principle — that is, as long as we are talking about legitimate rights, rights grounded in the order of creation, especially in the nature of man as God created him.
Many, even in the Church, seem to see this distinction as unnecessary, because they assume that the rights demanded by feminists (in many, many decibels and with much profanity) are the legitimate ones.
Just one example: Feminists see a key right of women as the right to work outside the home. Now, of course, women who really want to work outside, maybe even pursue a career, are entitled to that option. But what about the many women who actually want to stay home and be wives and mothers, homemakers, but are unable to do so, because we have an economy where both spouses usually need to work in order to support a family? (I will never forget a co-worker who, on learning she was getting a substantial raise, responded, “This is terrible, now my husband will never let me quit working.”)
When most women are able to stay at home, this strengthens the family (something feminists hate).
The right of women to be full-time homemakers is a legitimate right for the Church to support. In addition, it is closely tied to the right of the family not just to exist but to thrive, a right inseparable from the common good. So the right of women to stay in the home, and care for their families, needs to be protected in order to protect the common good and thus society as a whole. This right takes precedence over the rights of women seen only as autonomous individuals. … Continue Reading

Getting By With A Little Help From Our Friend

By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD

As I write this, the week’s news, both political and legal, provides plenty of grist for a column, but I’ve decided to ignore those things and do something I don’t often do. I’m going to write about something personal, something close to my heart.
It’s about a close friend of mine that didn’t get the job for which she applied.
The topic came to me over lunch while I was reading a column by Pieter Vree in this month’s New Oxford Review. Vree was writing about “The Myth of Meritocracy.” Meritocracy is the concept that suggests that status is earned, not inherited. He quotes British author Michael Young, in his 1958 bestselling book, The Rise of the Meritocracy: Society is “not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.”
Vree then spends the rest of his column picking apart the “myth” with examples and statistics that include the recent scandals in which rich parents were paying big bucks to gain admission to some of the nation’s top colleges for their children.
Now, I’m not quibbling with Vree; he makes a persuasive case to dispel the “myth.” However, the article brought to mind some of my personal experiences with those who, shall we say, were among the less fortunate in society, and one young lady whom I grew to love and admire.
I spent nearly six years as chaplain at a drug and alcohol recovery program. This program differed from some of the more traditional programs you might know about. It was for people who had addictions and who were in trouble with the law. In many respects the program was a jail diversion program. Most of the clients had multiple felony convictions, breaking and entering, prostitution, firearms possession, gang activities, and the like.
One man I dealt with, Ben (names are fictitious in this column), was facing nearly 45 years in prison. Another I dealt with was Jeri, who had a rap sheet nearly as long as my arm. I won’t go into what each had done — suffice it to say it was not God’s work. Each could have spent most of the rest of his or her life behind bars.
But they didn’t. They, much like the “myth,” pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and succeeded. But for each, like many of the others, it not only took quite a bit of inner strength, but large doses of Christian faith. … Continue Reading

Dems Seem To Think . . . Both Voters And God Will Ignore Their Rampant Extremism

By DEXTER DUGGAN

With all of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates for 2020 agreeing on radical pro-abortion extremism that most Americans reject, even though the Dem contenders need majority voter support, what’s around the corner if Democrats retake national power next year while an adoring media would glow with glee over new political strength for the Culture of Death?
“Diversity” in the Democratic Party’s presidential race means a large group of variegated candidates all saying the same thing.
“I don’t think there is room in our party for a Democratic candidate who does not support women’s full reproductive freedom,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was quoted by the Des Moines Register, which posted:
“During a meeting with the Register’s editorial board on Monday (June 10), the New York senator said all of the Democratic presidential candidates need to support repealing the Hyde Amendment, a law that blocks federal funding for abortion with few exceptions.”
Gillibrand used standard Dem avoidance of reality regarding massive permissive abortion, calling it such good things as a human right, and insisting that this vital blessing was opposed simply by unacceptably assertive religious views.
The Des Moines newspaper quoted her ramblings: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for Democrats who claim we are the party of women to impose religious views on other people. I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”
Meanwhile, pro-life Republican President Donald Trump on June 18 formally announced his bid for a second term to a packed arena of enthusiastic supporters in Orlando, plus tens of thousands more people watching huge screens outside. Trump included a strong pro-life message.
LifeNews.com reported on June 19 that Trump said, in part: “Virtually every top Democrat also now supports taxpayer-funded abortion right up to the moment of birth — ripping babies straight from the mothers’ womb. Leading Democrats have even opposed measures to prevent the execution of children after birth. You saw that in Virginia.”
Just after Trump’s campaign kickoff, pundit Glenn Beck told his radio audience that although photos show both Barack Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016 drew large, enthusiastic crowds for their first successful presidential campaigns, crowds for the disappointing Obama diminished for his re-election race in 2012, but Trump’s had not. … Continue Reading

USCCB Meeting Highlights Are Pretty Dim

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

America’s bishops meet twice a year, and this June’s meeting was supposed to be a doozy. In the past twelve months, two explosive scandals have rocked the U.S. hierarchy. On June 20, 2018, New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan revealed the charges of abuse and coverup against retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, one of the most powerful American prelates of the past century.
Then came the allegations of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Hiding in fear of his life, the former Vatican Nuncio to the United States detailed the extent to which the McCarrick Machine’s Sodomite Syndicate had penetrated the American Church.
By last fall, the public outrage had reached a decibel level that had not been heard since 2002, when the abuse-and-coverup scandals first erupted nationwide. Finally, last November, after years of circling the wagons, U.S. bishops were determined to “Do Something!” As that meeting began, our shepherds’ efforts to address the explosive scandals were shut down by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich on the orders of the Vatican.
Three months later, Pope Francis met with bishops from around the world. Now our American shepherds could finally face the music at their next meeting — the one held last week.
And what happened? They did nothing. Zero. The moment of truth came when Bishop Shawn McKnight of Jefferson City insisted that the laity be involved in any investigations of allegations of bishops. “Lay involvement should be mandatory to make darn sure that we bishops do not harm the Church in the way bishops have harmed the Church, especially what we have become aware of this past year. And now that we have experienced this horrible year of bad bishops, the laity too are rightly demanding that something must change.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, a stalwart advocate of transparence and accountability, then uttered the forbidden word. “I would encourage that we pursue their strong recommendations and support efforts to bring to light the McCarrick scandal issues as fully as possible. And as Bishop McKnight said, we need that mandatory aspect of the laity involved as much as possible.” … Continue Reading

Democrats Fight To “Out-Abort” Each Other In 2020 Races

By REY FLORES

It’s official. It’s off to the races!
The 2020 presidential race is on and it’s going to be a hoot! I can’t wait to hear what humorous monikers President Trump coins for the two-dozen delusional Democrat candidates who think they stand a chance against the greatest political movement in American history.
The Democrats really do not understand the American people at all, at least not the sane ones. It’s probably not so much that they do not understand people like you and me, but that they refuse to try and accept the reality which so justly keeps backfiring on them every time they think they’ve got us beat.
From the ludicrous Russian collusion fairytales to the Supreme Court nominations and hearings, Democrat socialists, which are one and the same, have no agenda to make America better. They have proven to be the party of absolutely nothing other than hate, lies, and spite. Their hatred for outsider President Trump is greater than any love any of them may have ever had — but it’s very doubtful — for our nation and her people.
They are embarrassingly still smarting from the smashing defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and have had no sleep ever since. The news and entertainment media, and the social media tech giants, which are basically extensions of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), have been working overtime, plotting their next move against our president.
Again, remember that when they are going after Trump, they are coming after all of us. This means everyone from millionaire socialist Bernie Sanders, to America-hater Kamala Harris and that sodomite mayor from Indiana who bears an uncanny resemblance to Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. They are all way off the charts.
Then there’s former Vice President Joe Biden who has spent more than half of his adult life in public office and still has the gall to announce that unless he becomes president, the country will continue to fail. It’s exactly people like Biden who have had more than enough chances to lead, but instead they just become another do-nothing D.C. swamp creature. … Continue Reading

Want To Bring Back The Nones? Bring Back The Eucharist

By SHAUN KENNEY

Remember those certain places that your parents told you never to go, but you did anyway? That’s Twitter…a place designed to share thoughts in 160 characters or less that has become a place where witticism and cutting remarks triumph over intellect and consideration.
Of course, given the concert between socialism and corporatism, it should come as no surprise that men such as Fr. Kevin M. Cusick — a contributor to The Wanderer — fell afoul of the powers that be. Fr. Cusick’s thought crime? Remarking that women should be modestly dressed inside a church.
Having just come from a part of the world where the penalty for wearing skirts that show ankles is death (or at the very least, the beating of one’s life), one finds the pearl clutching among so-called nones both exasperating and dull. Dress immodestly in front of the Western Wall or inside the Dome of the Rock and find out what happens; let’s see how many brave secular-minded Westerns have the courage of their convictions.
Ah, but culture! It’s different! We must be sensitive! Quite frankly, for a platform that consistently allows terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah to operate, where pornography abounds (if you look for it), where sock-puppetry — fake accounts used by one person to present the facade of popularity, directed against one person — is the norm, and where accounts are too often branded as “hateful” merely for quoting Scripture? Bah….
To wit, Live Action is currently banned by Pinterest. Their thought crime? Being pro-life, of course. When Project Veritas exposed the grift thanks to a whistleblower at Pinterest who said that staff labeled Live Action as pornography, Pinterest reacted…by firing the whistleblower. Not to be outdone, Twitter reacted by putting Project Veritas in the sin bin as well.
All the more reason why publications such as the one you are reading today are worth every dime of the expense. If we don’t maintain our own public square, there’s no reason to expect the world will grant us a fair hearing. They never have; they never will.

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Bishop Robert Barron at the USCCB Spring General Assembly remarks that over 50 percent of young Catholics who are catechized turn into “nones” — meaning non-religiously affiliated people.
Translation: They are hostile to a Catholic faith that is staffed full of frauds.
If there was one thing that I could hammer into the head of every priest, bishop, and cardinal in America, it is that the vast majority of the pew-sitting Catholics do not see them as friendly or practicing. … Continue Reading

It Wasn’t By Accident . . . How Did U.S. Have Such A Burden Of Immorality Loaded Onto Its Back?

By DEXTER DUGGAN

Promising to bring “transparency” to the workings of Washington, D.C., is about like promising to bring bright light to a locked, windowless cell ten thousand feet below ground. It would take a lot of explosive power to open up that chamber.
What happens on the surface in governing this nation, or probably any nation, is what rumbles up to the surface from the less obvious, or even more obvious, networks of ideologies, interest groups, their lobbyists and manipulators, and other actors.
After Brett Kavanaugh was proposed to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court last summer by President Trump, the scandalous circus of frenzied opposition to a supposed foe of Roe v. Wade was merely the result of how forces are marshalled in the D.C. game.
After the High Court sprang Roe on the nation in January 1973, we new pro-lifers hoped that the court wouldn’t finalize a decision so obviously deeply flawed. We never could have imagined it would take more than a few years to correct something so insupportably inadequate to the rule of law.
Responding to criticisms of the magical, extralegal, anti-science notions in the Roe majority, one of the justices reportedly said that they couldn’t just put their feet up on the windowsill, to think things through longer.
Shortly thereafter, the National Right to Life Committee held its first national convention as an incorporated organization in June 1973 in Detroit, a location chosen partly in recognition of voters in industrialized Michigan having strongly rejected permissive abortion in a referendum the previous November.
Pro-life liberals and conservatives of different religions gathered in Detroit to contemplate the task ahead.
In recent years the tide had been turning against early pro-abortion political victories, so the future looked promising. But now the nation’s highest court had stomped in with hobnailed boots to pulverize dissent against its newly declared lunacy.
Revelations in later decades of how the disastrously ill-informed justices had traded off and horse-traded over the fate of tens of millions of innocent lives showed once more that society’s “best and the brightest” actually may be nothing of the sort. … Continue Reading

The Catholic Who Declared Independence

By RAY CAVANAUGH

When the 13 American colonies announced their separation from the British Crown on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence they issued would become one of the most important documents in the English language. Some 56 patriots would risk their necks to sign this document. Only one, however, was a Catholic. His name was Charles Carroll.
He was born on September 19, 1737, in Annapolis, Md. “From his youth he was a singularly devout and scrupulously practical son of the Church,” according to The American Catholic Quarterly Review (volume XXIV, 1899), which added that the two foremost items in Carroll’s life were Catholicism and America.
Carroll’s earliest formal education took place at a secret Jesuit school in Maryland. But at around ten years of age, he was sent abroad to France. Making the journey along with him was his cousin, John Carroll, who later became the first Catholic bishop and archbishop of the colonial U.S. and the founder of Georgetown University.
At a series of Jesuit institutions in France, Charles Carroll received more than a decade of first-class education. From this period of tutelage, he emerged fluent in five languages. He additionally received training as a lawyer while in Europe, but was prohibited from practicing law upon his return to colonial Maryland because of his Catholic faith. In fact, due to his Catholicism he wasn’t even allowed to vote.
Despite these restrictions, his life was very privileged. For example, he inherited a fortune amounting to half a billion dollars in today’s currency. He also received an estate consisting of some 10,000 acres and — more controversially by today’s standards — hundreds of slaves.
Another item more controversial by today’s standards was that Carroll married his cousin Mary Darnall. They would proceed to have seven children, three of whom survived into adulthood. He would outlive his wife by 50 years.
Though he had abundant wealth to support his family, Carroll was growing agitated with the way Britain was governing America and the rising taxes imposed by the colonial master. He began associating with other like-minded American residents who were disgruntled with the status quo. … Continue Reading

The Bible… Is It A Hate Book Or Just A Hated Book?

By DEACON MIKE MANNO, JD

You would think that the Bible, on the whole, would be pretty noncontroversial. That, of course, isn’t true today, if it ever was. Today there are wholesale attacks on Scripture, not all of it, mind you, just the parts in which the attackers disagree.
Biblical values, especially those involving sex, marriage, and family, are now disputed even among mainstream thinkers. And because those values contradict many of today’s socially acceptable lifestyles, many view it as authorizing hate against those who don’t fully embrace its teaching.
Case in point — not that you need it pointed out — is the ever-evolving concept of marriage, homosexual relations, and the newest idea to float this boat: gender non-conformity.
And Christians today, including, unfortunately, many Catholics, tend to view the Bible as a smorgasbord: Take as much as you want of what you like and leave the rest. Many of the teachings contained therein thus cause division which, of course, means the Bible teaches hate. Or so it is said.
The result is that we’ve seen parts of Scripture defined as hate speech. And Bibles have been pulled from hotel and motel rooms, college guest housing, veterans’ memorial displays, and numerous other places where they once were often found.
Some of these things we’ve discussed here, others have come up on conservative Christian media, and many were a regular topic of discussion on my old Catholic radio program, Faith on Trial.
Yet there is one attack on the Bible that we haven’t talked much about, and while it is not a new attack, it is becoming more widespread and needs to be addressed. It is this: banning Bible studies in homes and apartments; the same being prohibited by homeowners associations, retirement communities, and local governing bodies.
“I don’t have hard numbers for you, and the decision-makers’ motives have varied. I can tell you that, in the past three years, we’ve had several of these situations involving seniors that certainly make it a trend,” said Matthew B. McReynolds, senior staff attorney for the Pacific Justice Institute (PJI).
PJI’s online bio of McReynolds notes that he “received his juris doctorate from Oak Brook College of Law in 2004. He then joined Pacific Justice Institute in early 2005. Prior to that time, Matt gained practical experience in defending religious liberties by clerking for the American Center for Law and Justice. During law school, he also was awarded first place in the prestigious Pew Scholarship Writing Competition sponsored by the Alliance Defense Fund.
“Since joining PJI, Matt has been actively involved both in litigation and in counseling countless churches, ministries and individuals as to their religious freedoms.”
Just in the past few years McReynolds has handled cases in California involving a homeowners association shutting down a worship service and Bible study for retirees in Bakersfield; and a similar case in Oakland where worship services were banned in a senior apartment complex. … Continue Reading

Young Girl Wiser Than Aged Biden… Dems Hug Close The Misdeeds Of Abortion And Socialism

By DEXTER DUGGAN

When a 13-year-old girl with most of her life ahead shows more knowledge and valor than a 76-year-old man who had decades to develop those virtues but signally failed, something seems amiss in this land.
Barely teenaged Addison Woosley was among those asking for Raleigh, N.C., to become a sanctuary city for preborn babies as she described ultrasounds illustrating the fate of the helpless infant trapped by an abortionist, according to a spate of videos and news reports.
These weren’t her opinions but observable facts. “On ultrasounds the baby tries to run away from the disturbing instruments that try to kill the baby. The baby’s mouth opens wide in a scream when being killed. These babies are alive. They feel being killed. It hurts them and there is nothing they can do about it. There is no way around it. Abortion is murder,” she said.
Addison spoke bravely at a city council meeting on June 4 even though her words stirred a loud, angry reaction from the other side in the chamber.
Two days later, on June 6, feckless Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, 76, formerly a U.S. senator for 36 years and vice president to Barack Obama for eight years, fled from his longtime support for the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits most federal abortion funding, because he’d been, gulp, criticized.
Biden came to support cruel permissive abortion, as suddenly invented by the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1973, but at least he’d said taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to fund it. At least until Biden, desperate to get more of the inflamed Dem base into his corner for the 2020 presidential race, recently decided that compelling everyone to underwrite the slaughter was lip-smacking good.
Shortly thereafter, on June 10, more than 180 big-business executives signed an expensive full-page advertisement in the Bible of Big, Brutal Abortion, The New York Times, saying that pro-life laws are “bad for business.”
The Adweek website quoted the executives’ threat, in part, as saying: “Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers. Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business. . . . … Continue Reading