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Restoring The Sacred… Meeting The Saints

July 13, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Restoring The Sacred… Meeting The Saints

By JAMES MONTI On June 25 I drove down to Philadelphia to meet two great men. The fact that they have been dead for almost five centuries did not dissuade me. For in Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul that evening, the English martyrs St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More were having a “meet and greet” of sorts — their relics, a bone fragment and tooth of More and a signet ring of Bishop Fisher, had arrived for the veneration of the faithful. The turnout was not on the epic scale that was witnessed in so many places last year when the body of St. Maria Goretti was brought to America for a pilgrimage tour, but those…Continue Reading

Will The West Survive The Century?

July 12, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Will The West Survive The Century?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN “Nativism . . . xenophobia or worse” is behind the triumph of Brexit and the support for Donald Trump, railed President Barack Obama in Ottawa. Obama believes that resistance to transformational change in the character and identity of countries of the West, from immigration, can only be the product of sick minds or sick hearts. According to The New York Times, he will spend the last months of his presidency battling “the nativism and nationalism” of Trump and “Britain’s Brexiteers.” Prediction: Obama will fail. For rising ethnonationalism and militarization of frontiers is baked in the cake, if the West wishes to remain the West. Behind that prediction lie the startling figures of the UN’s “World Population…Continue Reading

The Department Of Political Justice

July 11, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on The Department Of Political Justice

By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO Is it worth impairing the reputation of the FBI and the Department of Justice to save Hillary Clinton from a deserved criminal prosecution by playing word games? What has become of the rule of law — no one is beneath its protections or above its requirements — when the American public can witness a game of political musical chairs orchestrated by Bill Clinton at an airport in a bizarre ruse to remove the criminal investigation of his wife from those legally responsible for making decisions about it? How hairsplitting can the FBI be in acknowledging “extreme recklessness” while denying “gross negligence” about the same events, at the same time, and in the same respect? These are…Continue Reading

Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic . . . Free Trade And Catholic Social Teaching

July 10, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic . . . Free Trade And Catholic Social Teaching

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 Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also co-founder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. (Among his books is The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic, and two recent edited volumes: The Crisis of Religious Liberty and Challenging the Secular Culture: A Call to Christians. He recently completed writing a book that critically examines and evaluates current American liberalism and conservatism in light of Catholic social teaching.) + + + It is shaping up…Continue Reading

Five Justices Silently Permit Act Of Tyranny

July 9, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Five Justices Silently Permit Act Of Tyranny

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY Were you in Olympia, Wash,, and wanted to buy an abortifacient drug, there would be a multitude of places ready to sell you one. Ralph’s Thriftway, a local family-owned grocery store and pharmacy, would not be one of them. “Petitioners are Christians who believe that life is sacred from the moment of conception,” lawyers representing Stormans, Inc. (the family corporation that owns Ralph’s) and two individual pharmacists (who do not work at Ralph’s) wrote in a January petition to the Supreme Court. “Because of their religious beliefs,” said the petition (co-authored by attorneys from the Becket Fund and the Alliance Defending Freedom), “petitioners cannot stock or dispense the morning-after or week-after pills, which the FDA has…Continue Reading

The Massachusetts Miracle

July 8, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on The Massachusetts Miracle

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK One need not be a teacher or a school administrator to be aware of “progressive” theories of education. The buzzwords used in schools of education have seeped into the vernacular. We all have heard friends and neighbors pronounce in confident tones that the purpose of an education is not to “stuff a child’s mind full of names and dates,” but to teach him or her “how to learn,” to excite in them a “love of learning.” I can remember a former colleague in the New York high school where I taught saying, “A student is not a vessel to be filled, but a lamp to be lit.” It is an approach to learning that differs in…Continue Reading

Culture Of Life 101 . . . “The Second Time Around: Euthanasia In The Netherlands”

July 7, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Culture Of Life 101 . . . “The Second Time Around: Euthanasia In The Netherlands”

By BRIAN CLOWES Part 2 As we have seen, the euthanasia program in the Netherlands began in earnest in the 1970s with a strong propaganda campaign that supported physician-assisted suicide of those people who were near the end of their lives, and who suffered only the most extreme and intractable pain. But, as with all evil, euthanasia began with an “infinitely small, wedged-in lever,” and then spread rapidly and with almost no opposition. On February 9, 1993, after 15 years of pro-euthanasia agitation and lawbreaking, the Dutch Parliament finally caved in. It could no longer endure the divergence between actual practice and the law, and legalized what was “happening anyway.” Apparently unaware of the ghastly irony of its actions, the…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Western Civilization Owes Much To Hapsburg Rule

July 6, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Western Civilization Owes Much To Hapsburg Rule

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Judson, Peter M. The Hapsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press at The Harvard University Press, 2016. xiii+367 pp. The book takes as its subject the Hapsburg Empire (1770-1918), known in its various stages as the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and after 1867 as the Austrian Hungarian Empire. Peter Judson is professor of 19th and 20th-century history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He offers a “new history” in the sense that he differs from many contemporary historians insofar as he approaches his material from the perspective of empire, from the top down rather than by attempting to explain how its ethnic and regional components came together to create what…Continue Reading

Eastern Orthodoxy And Original Sin

July 5, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on Eastern Orthodoxy And Original Sin

By JAMES LIKOUDIS I am acquainted with some of Frederica Matthewes-Green’s fine writings, but she is not at her best when she seriously misunderstands the Catholic doctrine of original sin. Like many other Eastern Orthodox, she mistakenly thinks the “inherited guilt” of original sin means we have committed Adam’s sin. That is not Catholic teaching. According to the Catholic Church, original sin is a guilty state or sinful condition of human nature, not a guilty act that we ourselves have personally committed. It is, instead, the sinful state of human nature resulting from Adam’s sin. The nature of every man born into this world (except our Lord and His Immaculate Mother) is deprived of the divine life of grace as…Continue Reading

The Sunday After Brexit

July 4, 2016 Featured Today Comments Off on The Sunday After Brexit

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY It was off to one side of the train line but not too far away. The tower of an ancient church stood up in golden sunshine. Before it and beyond it rolled fields of brilliant green, crossed by hedgerows and accented by occasional trees. Stretching out in front of the church was a small village of solid stone houses. How old was that church? How old were those houses? How long had farmers tilled the fields around them? How long had this architecture — this village — stood in this rural part of England? The answers were impossible for a foreigner to immediately learn as the train from Scotland rolled smoothly and rapidly southward on its…Continue Reading