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Does God Have Rights?

July 22, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Does God Have Rights?

By DONALD DeMARCO God certainly had the opportunity to create whatever He wanted to bring into being. But was that opportunity also a “right”? Was it the right thing to do? What could justify creation? We can answer this in the positive because God is also good and what He created is good, as is stated in Genesis. Various thinkers throughout history have assigned God’s freedom a greater status than His goodness. William of Ockham, in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, maintained that murder, fornication, robbery, and other vices would be moral if they conformed to God’s Will. Therefore, God was at liberty to command anything He so desired, irrespective of its objective value. In this view,…Continue Reading

A Book Review… How To Build A Counterculture

July 21, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… How To Build A Counterculture

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Donal Anthony Foley reviews The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, 2017); 304 pages; available at amazon.com in hardback, paperback, and Kindle. The Benedict Option is a book that’s received a lot of praise, and also some criticism. It is composed of ten chapters covering areas such as roots of our present societal crisis, the need for a new kind of Christian politics and culture, and the importance of a truly Christian approach to education. This book essentially contains Rod Dreher’s views about the future of Christianity in the West. He sees a need for believers to become proactive, but in a countercultural way, by returning to the…Continue Reading

Catholic Charities Sues Near-Bankrupt St. Cloud Diocese

July 20, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Catholic Charities Sues Near-Bankrupt St. Cloud Diocese

By KEVIN JONES ST. CLOUD, Minn. (CNA/EWTN News) — The fate of a children’s home is the subject of a lawsuit against the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minn., by the diocese’s Catholic Charities affiliate, which fears the diocese’s planned bankruptcy could disrupt services at the facility. “We continue to support the mission of Catholic Charities, and we know they continue to support the mission and ministries of the diocese,” Joseph Towalski, director of the Office of Communications at the Diocese of St. Cloud, told Catholic News Agency July 11. “We believe the complaint will be properly resolved through the judicial process.” Towalski said the complaint is under review by legal counsel and the diocese would not comment on it at…Continue Reading

Taking God Seriously In Life And In The Sacred Liturgy

July 19, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Taking God Seriously In Life And In The Sacred Liturgy

By JAMES MONTI The concept of a sense of the sacred both within the liturgy and outside it embraces several closely interrelated dispositions — reverence and solemnity are two of which we have already spoken in previous essays. A third that warrants our attention is the disposition of “seriousness,” the perception of that which is so important that it must be treated with circumspection, sobriety, attentiveness, discretion, care, and reserve — a matter that cannot and should not be trivialized, banalized, or profaned. Seriousness is a face-to-face confrontation with reality, in particular the realities that touch upon our eternal destiny. We inhabit a culture that scarcely knows how to be serious anymore. In her 2016 paper “Contemplative Sorrow and the…Continue Reading

Federal District Court . . . Orders End To HHS Mandate For Ave Maria Law School

July 18, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Federal District Court . . . Orders End To HHS Mandate For Ave Maria Law School

FORT MYERS, Fla. — A federal district court issued an order Wednesday, July 11 that permanently prevents the federal government from enforcing the HHS mandate against a Catholic law school in Florida represented by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys. The order also declares that the mandate violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Obama-era mandate forces employers, regardless of their religious or moral convictions, to provide abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception through their health plans under threat of heavy penalties. The Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, abandoned its defense of the flawed mandate, which the Department of Health and Human Services implemented during the previous administration. “Religious organizations have the freedom to peacefully operate according to their beliefs…Continue Reading

Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic … Old And New Tyrannies Borne Of Lust

July 17, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic … Old And New Tyrannies Borne Of Lust

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly]. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Among his books are: The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic; Catholicism and American Political Ideologies, and a Catholic political novel, American Cincinnatus. His views, of course, are his own.) + + + We have seen one after another example of the tyrannical mindset of those who are at the forefront of this latter stage of the sexual revolution, led by…Continue Reading

A Book Review… What Man Does Not Reverence, He Will Profane

July 16, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… What Man Does Not Reverence, He Will Profane

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN Society and Sanity, by Frank Sheed (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2013), 261 pp. $17.95. Available from www.ignatius.com or at 1-800-651-1531. This new edition of Sheed’s 1953 classic work of apologetics brings to mind the famous myth of Procrustes’ bed. The wicked king captures his victims then tortures them if their legs do not fit his notorious bed. If they are too short, he stretches them; if too long, he cuts them to fit the size of the bed. Rather than build a bed to accommodate the variety of human beings, he twists and distorts the given, normal, natural sizes of human legs to force them to a prefabricated construction that does not respect or fit the nature…Continue Reading

How Vice Can Absorb Virtue

July 15, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on How Vice Can Absorb Virtue

By DONALD DeMARCO Just as the Devil is at war with God, so too, vices are at war with virtue. The Devil wants people to believe that God does not exist. He also wants people to believe that neither does virtue exist. He would like to demolish virtue. One way of achieving this is to convince people that virtue is really vice. According to this strategy, vice absorbs virtue into itself. Therefore, virtue is merely a pretense, or a fraud and really belongs to the category of vice. Here are ten examples of how the Devil attempts to carry out this sinister strategy. First, love is really a form of lust. Love is a virtue that promotes the good of…Continue Reading

Henan, China… New Limits Imposed On The Religious Freedom Of Catholics

July 14, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Henan, China… New Limits Imposed On The Religious Freedom Of Catholics

BEIJING (AsiaNews) — The Chinese government is approving increasingly restrictive measures against Catholics in the central province of Henan. As Eglises d’Asie reports, five new rules have been imposed which include the requirement of religious working in the province to collect data and information on their faithful. A priest from the Diocese of Zhengzhou reports he has received the order to register and declare the number of faithful and their respective socioeconomic conditions. According to the religious, this “census” could be “dangerous for the poorest families.” In fact, another consecrated person of the same province claims to have received the municipal authority’s order to collect data on the composition of the community, especially those of poor families. “It is totally…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Solzhenitsyn Remembered

July 13, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Solzhenitsyn Remembered

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Congdon, Lee. Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West. DeKalb, Ill.: NIV Press, 2017; 163 pp. This book is descriptive of the prophetic voice of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), who was convinced that the West has set out on a road similar to that which “led Russia into the abyss.” Solzhenitsyn first came to attention of the Western literati in 1962 with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the only book he was allowed to publish while in the Soviet Union. That was followed years later by his acclaimed Gulag Archipelago. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the…Continue Reading