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Sam Tuttle’s Treasure

October 24, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Sam Tuttle’s Treasure

By DEACON JAMES J. TONER Have Gun Will Travel was a most unusual western series, running on CBS from 1958 to 1963. Its hero was Paladin (played by the inimitable Richard Boone), a cultured and well-educated San Francisco gentleman who made his living by hiring out as, well, a principled gunslinger (oxymoron?) in the Old West. On Paladin’s holster was the image of a chess piece — a knight. Paladin was supposedly a graduate of West Point and a Union officer in the Civil War; he was as fast with a Shakespearean quotation as with his gun, and he invariably struggled to do the right thing in the challenging circumstances drawn up for him by the show’s writers. Among those…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Defending The Host In Communist China

October 23, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Defending The Host In Communist China

By JAMES LIKOUDIS Prozeller, Ellen Lucey, 32 Days: A Story of Faith and Courage (Pauline Books & Media 2016); available at Amazon.com. This is the inspiring fictionalized story (but based on fact) of an 11-year-old Chinese Catholic girl, Pei, who sacrificed her life to save and consume 32 Hosts left in an abandoned church after Communist soldiers in 1949 desecrated and well-nigh destroyed the edifice. Sneaking into the remains of the church night after night for 32 nights and avoiding the brutal guards still guarding it, Pei would prostrate herself before the Lord to make her own Holy Hour and consume the consecrated Hosts. Her heart would not allow her to leave her beloved Jesus abandoned and alone. On the…Continue Reading

Experimenting On Embryonic Humans Is Evil And Must Be Opposed

October 22, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Experimenting On Embryonic Humans Is Evil And Must Be Opposed

By FR. MARK HODGES (Editor’s Note: LifeSiteNews published this commentary on October 16. All rights reserved.) + + + UK scientists are experimenting on seven-day-old humans to learn how to “edit” DNA before killing them and discarding them. A team from the Francis Crick Institute is using “excess” living human embryos for their experiments who were frozen for in vitro fertilization (IVF). They then “edit” the human DNA by taking out a vital gene from “healthy, normal” embryos. States the BBC: “Breakthroughs in manipulating DNA have allowed the team at the Crick to turn off a gene — a genetic instruction — suspected to be of vital importance. The easiest way of working out how something works is to remove…Continue Reading

Book Review… Meditating On The Mysteries

October 21, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Book Review… Meditating On The Mysteries

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Donal Anthony Foley reviews The Rosary In Action, by John S. Johnson (TAN Books and Publishers), 271 pages; $16.95 paperback, $7.98 Kindle on Amazon). The Rosary In Action is a reprint of a book originally published in the early 1950s. It was written by a Catholic layman who had served in World War I, and thus lived through both of the great conflicts which convulsed the twentieth century. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is entitled, “The Message of the Rosary,” and in this the author gives his own personal experiences of praying and meditating on the rosary, as well as the historical background against which devotion to the rosary has spread…Continue Reading

The Making Of A Philosopher

October 20, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on The Making Of A Philosopher

By DONALD DeMARCO A new year arrives every 12 months; a new millennium, every 12,000 months. In celebrating the latter, how does one begin to do justice to its magnitude? The rarity of the event demands something far more imaginative than noisemakers and funny hats. There should be some serious reflection about life and the passing of time as one bids adieu to a thousand year epoch and welcomes the inauguration of its successor. Our hostess that evening of December 31, 1999 was up to the challenge. She distributed souvenir spoons to each of her guests and asked them to weave personal stories that each spoon evoked. Every spoon bore the name of a city. Mine was Munich, Germany, and…Continue Reading

Fr. Solanus Casey To Be Beatified November 18

October 19, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Fr. Solanus Casey To Be Beatified November 18

The beatification Mass for Fr. Solanus Casey is scheduled for November 18 at Ford Field in Detroit. “Not unlike the [1987] Silverdome Mass celebrated by St. John Paul, this, too, will be a history-making liturgy,” said Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit. “The beatification of Fr. Solanus Casey is an incomparable grace for the Church in the Archdiocese of Detroit and for the whole community. He is an inspiration to Catholics — and to all — of the power of grace to transform one’s life.” The Capuchins of the Pittsburgh Diocese will also celebrate the Casey beatification with a Tuesday, November 14 Mass, 6:30 p.m. at St. Augustine Church, Our Lady of the Angels Parish, 225-37th St., Pittsburgh, PA 15201. In May,…Continue Reading

Poverty As An Evil And Poverty As A Good

October 18, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Poverty As An Evil And Poverty As A Good

By PHILIP TROWER On November 19 the Church will celebrate the first “World Day of the Poor” which the Holy Father instituted last year at the end of the Jubilee of Mercy by means of the apostolic letter Misericordia et Misera. Then on the June 13 he issued a papal message entitled Do not Be Resigned to the Scandal Of Poverty to prepare more immediately for the event. Here he said that in the week before the World Day, he wants Christian communities to “make every effort to create moments of encounter and friendship, solidarity and concrete assistance” with the poor. No one, I think could deny that poverty is the subject nearest the Holy Father’s heart. I always remember…Continue Reading

Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic. . . The Many Assaults On The Rule Of Law

October 17, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic. . . The Many Assaults On The Rule Of Law

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Among his books is Abortion: Politics, Morality, and the Constitution, The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, and Catholicism and American Political Ideologies.) + + + A central principle of the American Founding — in fact, one that great thinkers have held as central for any democratic republic — is the rule of law. We often hear the…Continue Reading

A Book Review… The Spiritual Riches Of A Heroic Priest

October 16, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… The Spiritual Riches Of A Heroic Priest

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN With God in America, by Walter J. Ciszek, SJ; editors John M. Dejak and Marc Lindeijer, SJ. (Loyola Press: Chicago 60657, 2016), 253 pp.; $19.95. Available from www.loyolapress.com or call 1-800-621-1008. An anthology of Fr. Walter Ciszek’s unpublished works in the form of writings delivered at retreats, reflections on biblical passages, letters to friends seeking spiritual direction, and the memoirs and reminiscences of many priests and friends who cherished his memory and whose lives he touched, this collection offers the great spiritual riches of a holy and heroic priest who is under consideration for canonization. Volunteering to serve the Eastern Church in 1937 as pastor of a Polish church near the Russian border, Ciszek and other missionaries…Continue Reading

On The Importance Of Placing Second

October 15, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on On The Importance Of Placing Second

By DONALD DeMARCO The second, to be mathematically precise, is the time required for a cesium-133 atom to complete 9,192,631,770 oscillations. A lot more can happen within a second than most people realize. Science’s notion of exactitude has little in common with the ordinary man’s understanding of life. Fascinating as this fact is, as well as completely beyond human comprehension, the duration of the second is not the subject of this essay, but “second” referring to coming after first (from the Latin sequor: “I follow”). In his book, What’s Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton refers to the principle of the second wind. “In everything worth having,” he writes, “even in every pleasure, there comes a point or tedium that…Continue Reading