Read the Hobby Lobby letter explaining why the Obamacare HHS Mandate will not stand.

We’re Christians, and we run our business on Christian principles. I’ve always said that the first two goals of our business are (1) to run our business in harmony with God’s laws, and (2) to focus on people more than money. And that’s what we’ve tried to do. We close early so our employees can see their families at night. We keep our stores closed on Sundays, one of the week’s biggest shopping days, so that our workers and their families can enjoy a day of rest. We believe that it is by God’s grace that Hobby Lobby has endured, and he has blessed us and our employees. We’ve not only added jobs in a weak economy, we’ve raised wages for the past four years in a row. Our full-time employees start at 80% above minimum wage.

But now, our government threatens to change all of that.

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Maybe the Bible has it right about creation and the human species.

New research discovers that something “big” happened to the human genome, beginning some 5000 to 6000 years ago.

Most of the genetic quirks people carry today popped up within the last 5,000 years or so, researchers report online November 28 in Nature.

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Editor’s note: The six thousand year time frame coincides with the ancient’s world view, which dated the beginnings of human civilization to approximately six thousand years ago. This link explains how the 5th  century Catholic Church pretty much understood things to be.

AFA posts annual ‘Naughty or Nice List’ of retailers and how they choose to treat Christmas

AFA reviewed up to four areas to determine if a company was “Christmas-friendly” in their advertising: print media (newspaper inserts), broadcast media (radio/television), website and/or personal visits to the store. If a company’s ad has references to items associated with Christmas (trees, wreaths, lights, etc.), it was considered as an attempt to reach “Christmas” shoppers.

If a company has items associated with Christmas, but did not use the word “Christmas,” then the company is considered as censoring “Christmas.”

See the 2012 list

On the problem of accurately discerning God’s will for your life

If you’re trying to make a decision and you truly want to do God’s Will, try these 3 steps in order. If the first one works for you, there’s no need to move on to the second. If the second one works, there’s no need to go on to the third. If you get to the third mode, keep trying…it WILL work!

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New Evangelization V-CAT Project: The Catholic Catechism for teens explained in a series of dramatic videos. Free.

Produced by Outside da Box in collaboration with the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. The 48-film V-CAT (video catechism) series for teens will be released monthly from October 2012 – September 2016.

Three videos are currently available.

View on-line or download

Thanks to Brandon Vogt and New Advent for the tip

Research: Why women have abortions even when they understand it means killing their own child?

The summary report of the study bears the intriguing title “Abortion: The Least Of Three Evils-Understanding the Psychological Dynamics of How Women Feel About Abortion.” The report suggests that women do not see any “good” resulting from an unplanned pregnancy. Instead they must weigh what they perceive as three “evils,” namely, motherhood, adoption, and abortion.

Unplanned motherhood, according to the study, represents a threat so great to modern women that it is perceived as equivalent to a “death of self.” While the woman may rationally understand this is not her own literal death, her emotional, subconscious reaction to carrying the child to term is that her life will be “over.” This is because many young women of today have developed a self-identity that simply does not include being a mother. It may include going through college, getting a degree, obtaining a good job, even getting married someday; but the sudden intrusion of motherhood is perceived as a complete loss of control over their present and future selves. It shatters their sense of who they are and will become, and thereby paralyzes their ability to think more rationally or realistically.

When these women evaluate the abortion decision, therefore, they do not, as a pro-lifer might, formulate the problem with the radically distinct options of either “I must endure an embarrassing pregnancy” or “I must destroy the life of an innocent child.” Instead, their perception of the choice is either “my life is over” or “the life of this new child is over.” Given this perspective, the choice of abortion becomes one of self-preservation, a much more defensible position, both to the woman deciding to abort and to those supporting her decision.

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Abortion promoters provide young girls with misinformation, cheap condoms and/or low-dose birth control pills in order to set them up for unwanted pregnancies.

Watch the shocking video

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Article about porn addiction generates some interesting reader comments

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Catholic Social Teaching: It’s Time to End the Misrepresentations

I’m sick of it.  I’m sick of hearing that Catholic teaching regarding sex and marriage is one thing, in that old-fashioned trinket box over there, while Catholic teaching regarding stewardship and our duties to the poor is another thing, on that marble pedestal over here.

I’m sick of hearing that Catholic teaching regarding the Church and her authority is one thing, the embarrassing Latinate red-edged tome tucked away in that closet, while Catholic teaching regarding the laity is another, and pass that bread this way!

No, it is all of a piece.  What the Church says about divorce is inextricable from what she says about the poor.  What she says about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is inextricable from what she says about the respects in which all men are created equal—and the many respects in which she insists upon a salutary inequality.

When we fail to see the integrity of the faith, not only do certain truths escape our notice; the rest, the truths we think we see, grow monstrous, like cancers, and work to destroy the flesh they once seemed to replace.

Read more from Anthony Esolen at Crisis Magazine

New Series from California Catholic Daily: The ugly, decrepit and scandalous truth about abortion, abortionists, abortion proponents.

February 4, 1982: 16,433 dead bodies discovered in a repossessed land/sea storage container.

On February 4, when workers opened the doors to the steel box now parked in the container yard in Wilmington, they were overwhelmed with the stench of decaying human flesh. When they looked inside, they saw bodies strewn among open boxes and plastic buckets. One worker described the scene as a “war zone” and reported watching a headless body tumble forward.

The Martin Container employees called the Los Angeles County health department, who began transferring bodies to the county coroner’s office. At the coroner’s office, just west of the L.A. County/USC Medical Center, Dr. Eva Hauser, assisted by Dr. Joseph Wood, weighed, measured and performed autopsies on at least 43 of the larger baby bodies.

Some had been dead for more than two years. Some were at least 30 weeks old. All were severely mutilated through salt poisoning or dismemberment with surgical knives. The smell, the buzz of flies, and the sight of mangled infant bodies made the autopsy procedure difficult for the doctors. Many of the bodies still had labels which identified the abortionists.

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Coming in future weeks on California Catholic Daily:

Who Malvin Weisberg was

The role of the Martin Container company

How the 16,443 figure arrived at

What the coroner’s office did

The Inglewood Women’s Hospital

Gloria Allred attempts to prevent burial

Mothers’ and abortionists’ names on bodies

How Odd Fellows Cemetery chosen for burial

Future Chief Justice Roberts actions regarding Reagan letter

Clergy participation in burial service

Conrad cartoon in LA Times

4 pound 13 ounce baby Noah delivered with no heartbeat, yet survived.

Mom: “God heard my prayers.”

Video

Pope Benedict promotes his new book by making controversial statements about Christmas

Nothing at all about condoms, this time, thank God!

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Editor’s note: Has the pope declared his own “War on Christmas” merely to promote his latest book?  A complete lack of animals in the stable would logically require that the very pregnant Blessed Virgin Mary would have walked the 80 or so miles, from Nazareth to Bethlehem.  That’s roughly the equivalent of walking from Chicago to Milwaukee.

Survey says: “Why did you leave the Catholic Church”

Do you know someone who might want to share her thoughts with the church without being challenged? Here’s her chance. And she or he need not be from St. Andrew to have a say, Kelly said. She and Msgr. Michael Picard just want to know your thinking.

Take the on-line survey

Read the article

Police officer who was shot 12 times … and survived. “…it pays to be an altar boy. It pays going to Mass.”

This Thanksgiving, Police Officer Brian Murphy has much to be thankful for. Recovering after being shot 12 times, he was the first responder to the scene of the Sikh temple shooting in Wisconsin on Aug. 5 in which six worshippers died.

Text and video

Yes, Romney was the problem

The fact is liberal Republicans do not win presidential races.  The obvious reason for this is that RINOs do not offer much of a contrast to a Democrat, or at least a contrast so weak it does not motivate voters to support them.   You would think we would have learned this lesson from the McCain and Dole debacles.   To make things worse, Romney even agreed with Obama on numerous occasions during the debates, missing great opportunities to instead attack the president.  With the economy collapsing all around us, voters were simply not looking for Obama-light.

Moreover, Romney’s strategy of looking presidential but saying nothing controversial was an asinine strategy.  All one has to do is watch the old Reagan/Carter debates to see how Reagan strived to show contrast with Carter at every opportunity.  While Reagan was always civil in the way he stated things, he tore Carter’s head off every chance he got.

The list of explosive issues ignored by Romney goes far beyond those that Romney himself was weak on.  Take, for example, the Fast and Furious and Benghazi scandals, both of which involved the deaths of Americans and a subsequent cover-up by this administration.  The latter scandal, especially, was ripe for Romney to exploit, given the new evidence that Obama refused to assist Americans under attack and then lied to the American public about the reason for the attack.  This is an impeachable offense but Romney chose to ignore this issue altogether.

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Have we as pro-life Catholics been wrong to invest the lion’s share of our time, talent and energy in the political battle against abortion?

This question is forced upon us by the dramatic change in our social, cultural and political landscape over the past ten years or so, which has pushed problems every bit as important as abortion to the fore, for example the problems posed by the widespread breakdown of marriage and the family, the regularization of same-sex attraction and same-sex marriage, the triumph of a legal positivism utterly divorced from the natural law, our social dependence on a pagan bureaucratic State, the growing antipathy to Christianity, and the rapid erosion of religious liberty.

What we have learned in recent years is that we are not, as we have long thought, on the verge of winning the battle for human life. Rather, we must recognize that our culture as a whole has slipped into such darkness and error that addressing the problem of the sanctity of human life politically has become effectively impossible.

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Catechist sacked for teaching Catholic truth

But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no:
and that which is over and above these,
is of evil. (Matthew 5:37)

From California Catholic Daily

Last Wednesday, the day after the election, I spoke to the students about voting as Catholics first and shared the above non-negotiables with them.  A question came from a student asking “does this mean if you voted for Obama that you are not Catholic?”  I said that voting for a platform that supports intrinsic evil like that means you are not a “faithful Catholic.”

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Recovering the theological significance of Sunday is fundamental to rebalancing our lives.

For Christians, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, is a special day consecrated to the service and worship of God.  It is a unique Christian festival.  It is “the day the Lord has made” (Ps. 117 (118):24). Its nature is holy and joyful. Sunday is the day on which we believe God acted decisively to liberate the world from the tyranny of sin, death, and corruption through the Holy Resurrection of Jesus.

The primacy of Sunday is affirmed by the liturgical practice of the early church. St. Justin the Martyr writing around 150 AD notes that “it is on Sunday that we assemble because Sunday is the first day, the day on which God transformed darkness and matter and created the world and the day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead (First Apology, 67).” Sunday has always had a privileged position in the life of the church as a day of worship and celebration. On Sunday the Church assembles to realize her eschatological fullness in the Eucharist by which the Kingdom and the endless Day of the Lord are revealed in time.  It is the perpetual first day of the new creation, a day of rejoicing.  It is a day for community, feasting and family gatherings.

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Judge plans to deny bid for park Nativity displays

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal judge indicated Monday that she planned to deny a bid by churches to force Santa Monica to reopen spaces in a city park to private displays, including Christmas Nativity scenes.

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St. Padre Pio relics, a new church, and a miracle of healing

St. Padre Pio relics, a new church, and a miracle of healing reported in Brownsville.

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