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Blessings Of Solitude

March 29, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Blessings Of Solitude

By DONALD DeMARCO To those who are unaccustomed to solitude, restriction can be a painful experience. Philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich has reminded us that solitude can provide an atmosphere for creativity. “Our language,” he once said, “has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” Celebrated movie actor Tom Hanks, who has, unfortunately, contracted the coronavirus, corroborates the point. “There’s a difference between solitude and loneliness,” he maintains. “I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.” In solitude we are monks waiting to be born, preparing ourselves for a return…Continue Reading

Must We Kill The Economy To Kill The Virus?

March 28, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Must We Kill The Economy To Kill The Virus?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” tweeted the president on Sunday night, March 22, adding that, after the current 15-day shutdown, “we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.” President Trump is said to be privately expressing a deepening concern at the damage the coronavirus shutdown is doing to the U.S. economy and debating whether it can be safely reopened. Though castigated for his remark, Trump has a point. The U.S. is rightly using extreme measures to meet the threat and control the virus that threatens the lives of millions of Americans, with the elderly sick foremost among them. And we need to do so without…Continue Reading

Abortion And Solidarity With Children

March 27, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Abortion And Solidarity With Children

By MOST REV. JOSEPH STRICKLAND Pope St. John Paul wrote in his seminal encyclical on life, “To claim the right to abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom: ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin’ (John 8:34).” We are called to stand in solidarity with those who have no voice. To accept legalized abortion in the law and purport to “privately oppose it” is a perversion which promotes a counterfeit notion of freedom. In the Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Recalling The Papacy Of The Twentieth Century

March 26, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Recalling The Papacy Of The Twentieth Century

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Shaw, Russell. Eight Popes and the Crisis of Modernity, San Francisco, Ignatius Press: 2019. To order, visit www.ignatius.com or call 1-800-651-1351. This is a collection of essays on a subject Russell Shaw knows well, the papacy in the twentieth century. As a historian, the author is both profound and clear in his treatment of complex issues. One does not have to be a Catholic to appreciate this profile of a Church responding to an aggressive modernity. The book may also be read as a chronicle of a tumultuous period. The book opens with an essay on Pius X, born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto in 1835. Following service as a parish priest and seminary professor, he was ordained bishop…Continue Reading

Coronavirus And The Collection Basket . . . Parishes Feel Quarantine Cash Crunch

March 25, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Coronavirus And The Collection Basket . . . Parishes Feel Quarantine Cash Crunch

By JONAH McKEOWN DENVER (CNA) — While dioceses across the country have canceled public Masses in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus, a number of parishes are remaining open for prayer, Eucharistic adoration, and Confession, and continuing charitable work in the community. But some parishes, especially those serving poor communities, have already begun feeling a financial pinch as they lose access to in-person parish collections. For Fr. Joseph Lajoie, pastor at Sacred Heart Parish in Denver, dwindling cash flow during the coronavirus crisis constitutes a “potentially crippling, if not mortal, blow” to the parish. “We are as antiquated as our registration system. It’s a three-ring binder,” Lajoie told Catholic News Agency. The Archdiocese of Denver suspended public Masses March 13. “So…Continue Reading

Catholic League Says . . . Detroit Bishops Slammed For Their Fidelity

March 24, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Catholic League Says . . . Detroit Bishops Slammed For Their Fidelity

NEW YORK — Catholic League President Bill Donohue commented March 18 on recent attacks on the bishops of Detroit: When we learned that Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Gerard Battersby, following the lead of Archbishop Allen Vigneron, was instructing priests not to allow a Mass for members of Dignity Detroit, we did not feel compelled to say anything. After all, DignityUSA rejects the Church’s teachings on sexuality and has been openly defiant of America’s bishops for decades. But now that the Detroit bishops are coming under fire for practicing fidelity, a lay Catholic response is necessitated. The first dissident group to defend the Detroit chapter of Dignity, and to attack the Detroit bishops, was New Ways Ministry. It has now been followed…Continue Reading

Panic Is Not Useful . . . We All Are In God’s Hands During The Pandemic

March 23, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on Panic Is Not Useful . . . We All Are In God’s Hands During The Pandemic

By JAMES ASHER, D.O. (Editor’s Note: Dr. Asher holds a 1973 degree from University of Osteopathic Medicine and Health Sciences in Des Moines, followed by University of Nebraska Medical Center residency. He has served at the Carl T. Hayden Veterans Administration Medical Center in Phoenix and the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. He is retired but works with the Mission of Mercy here, which serves low-income people. He is married to Rosie, with seven grown children, and teaches catechism to grade-school youngsters.) + + + Awash as our culture is in antibiotics, and as germ-free and disease free as we are, death or the threat of it almost seems foreign to our experience. If I or any of my family gets…Continue Reading

The Mystery Of Atheism

March 22, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on The Mystery Of Atheism

By DONALD DeMARCO Is it possible to be completely atheistic? How can a person stifle the moral law within his soul and remain unmoved by the starry skies above? The religious impulse lies within each one of us. How is it possible for that impulse to be completely ignored? If there is no God, why should anyone struggle in the pursuit of his aspirations? Is not the ultimate aspiration to be with God? George Will informs us in his new book, The Conservative Sensibility (2019), that “I am not religious at all [but] . . . I deeply respect religions and religious people. The great religions reflect something constant and noble in the human character, defensible and admirable yearnings. I…Continue Reading

In The Pandemic, It’s Every Nation For Itself

March 21, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on In The Pandemic, It’s Every Nation For Itself

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” said Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey to a friend on the eve of Britain’s entry into the First World War. Observing from afar as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the Old Continent, Grey’s words return to mind. And as the Great War changed Europe forever, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be changing the way European peoples see each other. “All for one and one for all!” These were the words by which “The Three Musketeers” of Alexandre Dumas lived their lives. This was the ideal upon which the EU and NATO were built. An attack against one is an…Continue Reading

A Fractured Nation In Need Of God

March 20, 2020 Featured Today Comments Off on A Fractured Nation In Need Of God

By LAWRENCE P. GRAYSON On March 4, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the legality of a Louisiana law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. At a pro-abortion rally outside, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened two of the sitting justices who were thought to be favorable to the pro-life issue. Four weeks earlier, as President Donald Trump concluded his State of the Union Address before a Joint Session of Congress, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi — a leader of the opposition party — tore up a copy of his speech on national television. Schumer’s threat and Pelosi’s churlish act dramatized how shattered is the culture of the country. The lines of fracture…Continue Reading