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Fancy Human Parts Sold Here

July 15, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Fancy Human Parts Sold Here

By REY FLORES “Fancy poultry parts sold here, breasts and thighs, and hearts. Backs are cheap and wings are nearly free, nearly free….” — lyrics from the 1987 song Ironbound/Fancy Poultry by Suzanne Vega. + + + The above lyrics came to me almost immediately as a reaction to the video that was released this week of the high-ranking “doctor” at Planned Parenthood who was videotaped talking to undercover investigators about selling organs and body parts from aborted babies. Unlike the aforementioned song lyrics, these aren’t poultry parts that we’re talking about here, but real human baby parts that apparently are yet another money-making racket for the abortion mega-giant. This so-called doctor chatted away in a nonchalant manner over salmon,…Continue Reading

A Potpourri… Reincarnation And Other Matters

July 15, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on A Potpourri… Reincarnation And Other Matters

By GEORGE A. KENDALL Why is the idea of reincarnation so fascinating to so many of us? Even a devout Catholic like mystery writer Mary Higgins Clark, who, while denying that she actually believes in reincarnation, clearly shares this fascination, and has used the idea in several of her novels. And I have to admit that it fascinates me at times. In the first place, the obvious: Reincarnation is incompatible with Christian teaching. The clear witness of Scripture tells us: “It is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb. 9:27). In other words, we only have one shot at this. Each human life is a unique, never to be repeated event. The idea of reincarnation,…Continue Reading

Attorney Worries Of Society’s Future . . . Pro-Homosexual Activists Win Against Jewish Counseling Group

July 14, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Attorney Worries Of Society’s Future . . . Pro-Homosexual Activists Win Against Jewish Counseling Group

By DEXTER DUGGAN RANCHO SANTA FE, Calif. — A large portrait of St. Thomas More, the chancellor of England martyred for his faith in 1535 over the issue of government mandates and marriage, keeps company with attorney Charles LiMandri in his office here. Centuries have moved past since More’s beheading in London on a July 6, but the issues don’t seem to have changed much for LiMandri, president and chief counsel of the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (conscience defense.org), headquartered in this town in northern San Diego County. Once again governments are telling people their faith must submit to powerful secular officials issuing mandates against marriage and religious tradition, or else they face serious punishment. The Wanderer sat down…Continue Reading

Is Notre Dame Just Another Football Factory?

July 13, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Is Notre Dame Just Another Football Factory?

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK My suspicion is that a good percentage of readers of this column will not be surprised to hear that we get as much mail when we bring up Notre Dame football as when we discuss the slide away from Catholic orthodoxy at the South Bend campus. For Catholics of a certain age, Notre Dame football is an important part of our heritage in the United States. When I was a boy in New York City, there were Notre Dame fans all over the neighborhood — cops, firemen, factory workers — who had no connection to the university. They were routinely called the “subway alumni” in the New York City newspapers. There was a reason. There were…Continue Reading

The Land Of Porno, Loneliness, And Suicide

July 12, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on The Land Of Porno, Loneliness, And Suicide

By REY FLORES If you’re like me, you visit the Drudge Report online a few times a day to read about what is going on in the world. Drudge offers all sorts of headlines about geopolitics to sports and entertainment and everything in between. The one headline that stood out to me last week was this one: “ ‘Porn,’ ‘Lonely,’ ‘Suicide’ Among Top Late Night Google Searches.” The headline refers to a recent New York Times analysis about what people are searching online at different times of the day. Apparently in the dark of night, all sorts of wild emotions are stirred in us, from lust to ideations of suicide. So what does all of this data tell us? It…Continue Reading

Liberty Without Wings

July 11, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Liberty Without Wings

By DONALD DeMARCO Certain thinkers of the past, whose minds were more in love with theory than with practice, believed that birds could fly faster in a resistance-less medium, that is, in a vacuum. Without the air to push their wings against, as we now know, birds would not be able to fly at all. They would also need oxygen to take in so that they could remain alive. The point here is that, although the temptation exists to increase freedom beyond its natural boundaries, freedom is conditioned. In a nutshell, there is no liberty without truth, just as there is no justice without truth. And so, too, marriage is conditioned. People do have a right to marry, but it…Continue Reading

Christian Losers

July 10, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Christian Losers

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK A column from the British newspaper The Guardian recently was brought to my attention. It was entitled “Christianity, when properly understood, is a religion of losers.” There were two themes that seemed most likely to me at first glance: either Nietzsche’s depiction of Christianity as a religion that grew because it offered soft individuals, lacking in vigor and competence, a worldview that elevated their inadequacies into virtues; or the vision of Christianity as an instrument to achieve social justice for the downtrodden and exploited, one form or another of the Social Gospel. It turned out to be neither. What I found, in the article by Giles Fraser, was not exactly at odds with either of the…Continue Reading

What Comes Next?… The Short Steps To Mandating “Same-Sex Marriage”

July 9, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on What Comes Next?… The Short Steps To Mandating “Same-Sex Marriage”

By DEXTER DUGGAN How harshly and how soon will Catholics and other traditionalists start to suffer penalties after the Supreme Court’s June 26 invention of the alleged fundamental constitutional right for homosexuals to “marry” each other in Obergefell v. Hodges? Indeed liberal opinion has transformed the courthouse rapidly. Only short decades ago the deadly public-health threat of the “AIDS Plague” among homosexuals was major news. But that had to be edged off the front page if awarding marriage certificates to engage in this sort of behavior while relying on medication could seem to make sense. Obergefell isn’t the first time that the High Court has declared basic legal protection and honor for something that core Catholic teaching proclaims to be…Continue Reading

“Catholic Majority” On High Court… Helps Put Nation In Danger Through Lawless Decisions

July 8, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on “Catholic Majority” On High Court… Helps Put Nation In Danger Through Lawless Decisions

By DEXTER DUGGAN As the workweek concluded on June 26, national radio talk host Hugh Hewitt declared it to be a week “pivotal in the life of the country.” On two successive days, June 25 and 26, the Catholic-majority U.S. Supreme Court had issued two utterly baseless, lawless decisions affecting everyone’s life here, and what the rest of the world sees as the example set by America. Especially dangerous was the court’s obvious assumption that its mere majority vote was enough to compel national obedience — even though the court’s opinions were clearly, demonstrably false, and contrived. With our basic liberties and rights limited by such deceits, a national alarm must be sounded that this court must firmly be brought…Continue Reading

Restoring The Sacred . . . What A Time-Honored Military Rite Can Teach Us About The Liturgy

July 7, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Restoring The Sacred . . . What A Time-Honored Military Rite Can Teach Us About The Liturgy

By JAMES MONTI (Editor’s Note: Restoring the Sacred will be a semi-regular feature in The Wanderer, written by James Monti, who recently covered the Sacra Liturgia USA 2015 Conference and also wrote a two-part critique of the screen adaptation of Wolf Hall for us. Monti wrote The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997].) + + + During his eight-year pontificate Pope Benedict XVI imparted to the Church a rich and enduring legacy, at the heart of which was his endeavor to restore a sense of the sacred to the liturgy, the supreme expression of his famed “hermeneutic of continuity,” whereby, “What earlier generations held as sacred, remains…Continue Reading