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Ban The Bomb: One More Once

June 10, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Ban The Bomb: One More Once

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK I used to enjoy listening to Count Basie proclaim, “One More Once!” near the end of his 1960s jazz version of April in Paris. It was his signal that the band was going to repeat a few more rip-roaring bars of the song. The words came to mind when I picked up the May 4 edition of the Jesuits’ America magazine and saw an article by Kevin Clarke entitled “No More Nukes?” Clarke details the work of a new group seeking to ban the bomb, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Members of the organization met in Vienna in December of last year, where the group’s executive director, Beatrice Fihn, warned of the 16,330…Continue Reading

Courage Conference Set For August . . . Director Says Synod Should Remember Faithful People Who Experience SSA

June 9, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Courage Conference Set For August . . . Director Says Synod Should Remember Faithful People Who Experience SSA

By DEXTER DUGGAN The concerns of people with same-sex attraction (SSA) who follow Church teaching should be remembered at the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family in Rome, the director of an international apostolate in this area said in an interview. “My hope is that the voice of the man or woman with same-sex attraction…is a voice that will be heard” there, Fr. Paul Check, executive director of Courage International, told The Wanderer during a June 2 telephone interview. His organization, headquartered in the Diocese of Bridgeport, Conn., plans to hold an international conference in August near Detroit to help answer questions posed in preparatory documents for the October Synod on the Family. A flier for the conference referring…Continue Reading

More Mothers Like Toya Graham

June 8, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on More Mothers Like Toya Graham

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK Toya Graham, the black mother who slapped her son “up side the head” to get him away from the other young black men throwing rocks at the police in Baltimore, has been getting praised all over the talk shows. I was tempted to disagree, to point out that she should not be treated as a hero, considering that she is the single mother of six children and that her behavior is part of the problem plaguing minority communities. But I had second thoughts. I could not find any details about Graham’s family situation. Perhaps she is a widow, struggling to keep her family above water in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Baltimore where the rioting was taking…Continue Reading

Obama Gives Us A Divisive LGBT Declaration

June 7, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Obama Gives Us A Divisive LGBT Declaration

By REY FLORES “Now, therefore, I, Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States do hereby proclaim June 2015 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month” — Presidential Proclamation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month, 2015. + + + President Obama himself has declared it officially. We as a nation now celebrate what was once considered unspeakable in decent company. From now on, June will no longer be about graduations, and especially not about Father’s Day anymore, that is, unless your father is like Bruce Jenner, transforming into Caitlyn Jenner right before your very eyes. As my friend…Continue Reading

Murdered For A Dance

June 6, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Murdered For A Dance

By RAY CAVANAUGH Many are aware that John the Baptist, whose feast day is June 24, was the one who baptized Jesus. But people may not know about the strange and rather warped circumstances under which he died: While imprisoned by the tetrarch Herod Antipas, John the Baptist was beheaded as compensation for a single dance performed by the king’s stepdaughter. John the Baptist reportedly was born six months before Jesus. His father was a priest in the Temple of Jerusalem, and his mother was related to Mary, Mother of Jesus. As a young man, John spent much time in solitude in the Judean Desert. He then resurfaced as a preacher who began to attract a considerable following. Among those…Continue Reading

Cardinal Burke . . . Reverent Liturgy Essential To Catholic College Education

June 5, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Cardinal Burke . . . Reverent Liturgy Essential To Catholic College Education

By JUSTIN PETRISEK (Wanderer Editor’s Note: The Wanderer will have more coverage of Sacra Liturgia USA 2015 in its coming issues. Also, please see our website, www.thewandererpress.com, for conference updates from James Monti, who is reporting on the event. (Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society, provided this article. Justin Petrisek is on the staff of CNS. All rights reserved.) + + + Properly and beautifully celebrated liturgy is essential to a Catholic college education, said Raymond Cardinal Burke, who headlined the June 2 Cardinal Newman Society event at Sacra Liturgia USA 2015 in New York City. “If in Catholic education the ultimate goal is to know Christ as deeply and as profoundly as possible, then…Continue Reading

Neither Freedom Nor Safety

June 4, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Neither Freedom Nor Safety

By ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages, and emails of all Americans all the time. In the process, while publicly claiming they only acquire identifying metadata — the time, date, location, duration, telephone numbers, and email addresses of communications — they have in fact surreptitiously gained access to the content of these communications. On June 1, one of the three claimed legal…Continue Reading

The Joyful Death Of Catholic Ireland

June 3, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on The Joyful Death Of Catholic Ireland

By JAMES MATTHEW WILSON (Editor’s Note: This essay is reprinted with permission from Crisis Magazine [www.crisismagazine.com]. All rights reserved. (James Matthew Wilson is associate professor of religion and literature in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, Four Verse Letters [Steubenville: 2010] and of Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction [Story Line: 2012], and a new collection of poems entitled The Violent and the Fallen [Finishing Line Press]. Readers can learn more about his writing at jamesmatthewwilson.com.) + + + Do you remember the joke about the Irish brewery worker who drowned in a vat of suds? “Poor Sean,” the new widow said upon learning her husband’s fate, “He…Continue Reading

Defending St. Thomas More . . . A Critique Of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall In Its Screen Adaptation

June 2, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Defending St. Thomas More . . . A Critique Of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall In Its Screen Adaptation

By JAMES MONTI Part 1 (Editor’s Note: James Monti, the author of this two-part series, wrote The King’s Good Servant but God’s First: The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997].) + + + In a May 2012 interview, Hilary Mantel, author of the Tudor novel Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies, openly declared her view that “the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.” (1) That, I suppose, would exclude from the ranks of respectable society myself and most of the readers of this column. It would also exclude from respectability about a billion of the Earth’s current inhabitants. If Mantel had said such a thing about almost any…Continue Reading

Jumping The Shark At Le Moyne

June 1, 2015 Frontpage Comments Off on Jumping The Shark At Le Moyne

By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK “Jumping the Shark” is a figure of speech used to denote a moment when an individual or institution — a television program, musical performer, politician, or advertising campaign, for example — does something so over-the-top that it signals a fatal weakness or loss of purpose that prevents people from taking the person or group seriously ever again. The idiom has its origins in a scene from the old television sitcom Happy Days, when the character Fonzie, in a ridiculous scenario, jumps over a shark while on water skis. You could tell the show’s writers were getting desperate. The show left the air not long afterward. I would argue that the “progressive” activists among the faculty and…Continue Reading