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What Lies Beyond Stardom

January 4, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on What Lies Beyond Stardom

By DONALD DeMARCO At the end of each year, the media brings to our attention a chronicle of movie celebrities whose lives came to an end during that particular year. The list of these celebrities who passed from this world in 2014 is, as it always is, disquieting. So many lives, so vibrant on the screen, now extinguished. We always experience a certain shock, along with a piercing sadness when we learn of their demise. Did not Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Lauren Bacall, and Sid Caesar appear to be immortal in celluloid? Did David Brenner, Joan Rivers, and Bob Hoskins have any premonition that their lease on life would suddenly expire? We watched Eli Wallach, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Harold…Continue Reading

Denigrating President Putin

January 3, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Denigrating President Putin

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY “You are possibly the most demonized politician in the world today.” Those are the words of journalist Peter Lavelle, spoken directly to President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a recent conference. The occasion was the October Valdai Conference at Sochi where Putin addressed an assembly, received questions, and exchanged views with Western political leaders, including former Prime Minister of France Dominique de Villepin, former Federal Chancellor of Austria Wolfgang Schuessel, and representatives of a number of international institutions, including reporters. The annual Valdai Conference, now in its 11th year, has begun to address issues related not just to Russia but to global economics and politics as well. The denigration of Putin goes on unabated worldwide, reflecting…Continue Reading

A Book Review . . . Liberalism Has Deprived Society of Accepted Moral Standards

January 3, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review . . . Liberalism Has Deprived Society of Accepted Moral Standards

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Safranek, John P. The Myth of Liberalism. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015. xvii + 270 pp. This is a timely volume by an author who is both a practicing physician and a philosopher. Drawing upon both his professional experience and the perennial philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, he challenges the liberal zeitgeist which prevails in centers, high and low, throughout the Western world. In the opening pages of his book, Safranek shows clearly that liberalism is not a coherent philosophy but is, rather, “a collection of causes marshalled under the banner of personal liberty by powerful social and political interests.” Liberty, equality, right, and nearly all other ephemeral liberal values, he says, are…Continue Reading

Meriam Ibrahim Is Role Model Of The Year

January 2, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Meriam Ibrahim Is Role Model Of The Year

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY In a year when some of the most exalted public figures in the United States distinguished themselves by advancing unjust causes or cowardly refusing to seriously resist them, a pregnant mother imprisoned in Sudan with her 18-month-old American son set a standard for saintly courage. Meriam Ibrahim is the role model of the year. When a Sudanese court told Meriam she must renounce her Catholic faith and convert to Islam or be hung by the neck until dead, she gave a non-negotiable answer: No. Meriam was born in Sudan to a Christian mother and a Muslim father — who abandoned the family when Meriam was 6. Her mother raised her a Christian. In December 2011, in…Continue Reading

Cardinal Burke: It’s ‘amazing’ that faithful Catholics are now accused of opposing the Church

January 1, 2015 Featured Today Comments Off on Cardinal Burke: It’s ‘amazing’ that faithful Catholics are now accused of opposing the Church

By HILARY WHITE Raymond Cardinal Burke said in an interview this week that it is “amazing” that those who have defended Catholic teaching and practice on withholding Communion from those in publicly “irregular” sexual situations, are being accused of “being against the Holy Father, and of not being in harmony with the Church.” The blog Rorate Caeli carried a translation of the comments Cardinal Burke made this week to the French language daily, Le Figaro. Burke, one of a small group of vocal opponents of the so-called Kasper proposal, said that October’s Synod of Bishops on the family “was a difficult experience.” Those who were “in line” with Walter Cardinal Kasper had control of the synod’s processes, he said. Burke…Continue Reading

Drones Or Waterboarding?

December 31, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Drones Or Waterboarding?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK I hesitate to disagree with the consensus among the leading conservative talk show hosts and Fox News commentators about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on enhanced interrogation techniques. Why do I hesitate? My fear is that readers will think I am disagreeing just to make a point, engaging in an effort to puff up my image as an “independent thinker” who does not march in lockstep with those on my side of the political spectrum. That syndrome exists. I would argue, for example, that there was a rush to judgment by conservative commentators to condemn the grand jury that refused to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner. Garner…Continue Reading

Obama Throws Fidel A Rope

December 30, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Obama Throws Fidel A Rope

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN The celebrations in Havana and the sullen silence in Miami told you all you need to know about who won this round with Castro’s Cuba. In JFK’s metaphor, Obama traded a horse for a rabbit. We got back Alan Gross before his Communist jailers killed him, along with an American spy, in exchange for three members of a Cuban espionage ring. Had we left it at that, the deal would have been fine. But Obama threw in an admission that all nine presidents before him pursued a “failed policy.” Calling for recognition of the Castro regime as the legitimate government of Cuba, Obama said, “Isolation has not worked.” “Not worked”? What is he talking about? Isolating…Continue Reading

My Five Christmas Gifts

December 29, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on My Five Christmas Gifts

By DONALD DeMARCO If prayer and pen can conjure up a gift, I would like to utilize this possibility and provide five Christmas gifts for my faithful readers of The Wanderer. These “gifts” would be of an intellectual nature, “lights,” as it were, consistent with the “Five Mysteries of Light” that St. John Paul II added to the rosary. Christmas centers on a Light that dispels darkness and illumines the mind and heart so that the message of Jesus can be more clearly discerned. My “gifts,” therefore, are intended to illuminate five areas of darkness that have clouded certain truths of the Catholic faith. My hope is that these “gifts,” which are merely restatements of enduring truths, will be treasured…Continue Reading

Christmas Prayer

December 28, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on Christmas Prayer

By DEREK BECHER Dear Lord On this lovely, holy Eve, Be with me, I pray And guide me to understand your coming, And why it is we celebrate, especially now. Help me to look beyond the presents and their flowing ribbons; Open my heart and my eyes, and help me to see and feel The suffering that shakes our Earth. Many hunger, and are cold and lonely In this world of plenty; And many stray from your light, by evil and its ways. And the hustle and bustle, How I fear it’s replaced the real joy we should feel. That starry night so long ago So quietly, peacefully, you entered our world And through your love, your guidance, your sacrifice…Continue Reading

How The Prophets Heralded The Incarnation

December 27, 2014 Featured Today Comments Off on How The Prophets Heralded The Incarnation

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY This article will look at how many of the events which took place at the first Christmas two thousand years ago, in Bethlehem, were foreshadowed in the Bible, and so have a deeper significance than is generally realized. The fact is that there are many biblical prophecies that were fulfilled by Christ, to the extent that the Old Testament without the New Testament becomes a rather puzzling collection of “books.” Indeed, the word “Testament” could be better translated as “Covenant,” and this relates to the way Jesus spoke about a “New Covenant” at the Last Supper, a covenant between God and His people that would supersede the Old Jewish Covenant. In any event, we can certainly…Continue Reading