September 28, 2015
Categories: Books & Publications, Catholic Theology, Events, Inspirational . Tags: chosen, hate, Jesus Christ, love, papal visit, Pope Francis, the world, United States . Author: Doug Lawrence . Comments: 4 Comments
There goes the ol’ Peace Prize…
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Thursday prepared for the possibility of launching unilateral American military action against Syria within days as Britain opted out in a stunning vote by Parliament. Facing skepticism at home, too, the administration shared intelligence with lawmakers aimed at convincing them the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its people and must be punished.
Despite roadblocks in forming an international coalition, Obama appeared undeterred and advisers said he would be willing to retaliate against Syria on his own.
Editor’s note: No doubt the president believes that Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohamed will be proud of him. As everyone already knows – President Obama’s word – is his bond!
Archbishop Chaput: “The HHS mandate can only be understood as a form of coercion.”
“Access to inexpensive contraception is a problem nowhere in the United States,” he said. “The mandate is thus an ideological statement; the imposition of a preferential option for infertility. And if millions of Americans disagree with it on principle–too bad.”
The archbishop went on to observe that abortion advocates use fraudulent language in describing their position.
“The fraud at the heart of our nation’s ‘reproductive rights’ vocabulary runs very deep and very high,” he wrote. “In his April 26 remarks to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the president never once used the word ‘abortion,’ despite the ongoing Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia and despite Planned Parenthood’s massive role in the abortion industry.”
Editor’s note: Judging by the revelations concerning the Archdiocese of New York, Obama and his minions already know that coercion is very likely to succeed.
In God We Trust: A few other things worth remembering this Memorial Day.
There’s an extraordinary amount of Judeo-Christian religious tradition incorporated into the design elements of the Nation’s Capitol – especially for a nation that is often portrayed today as “secular”.
Submitted by John Z.
Top 10 Catholic Cities, USA
Based on culture, history, physical landscape and spirituality, the following list of Top 10 U.S. Catholic Cities — listed in no particular order — highlights American hubs with a Catholic pulse. Each location, whether it be large or small, east or west, contributes to the richness of Catholic life in America.
Should these locations be next door, across the state or across the country, OSV Newsweekly hopes this list will prove useful and inspiring when it comes to incorporating the Faith into your travel plans this summer.
Editor’s note: There’s just one small problem with these venues: It’s almost impossible to to tell the Catholics from the non-Catholics – especially when it comes to Catholic politicians – and the Catholic vote.
Pope: Support for US march for life.
(Vatican Radio) Pope Benedict XVI has pledged his support for the March for Life in the United States.
Using his @pontifex Twitter handle, the Pope said, “I join all those marching for life from afar, and pray that political leaders will protect the unborn and promote a culture of life.”
This year’s March for Life is marking the 40th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in all fifty states.
Earlier this week, the Holy Father issued his Message for World Communication Day, in which he called on Catholics to be engaged through all forms of social media, especially new media, in spreading the Good News and building up public discourse.
Congressman Ron Paul hits one out of the park…
In a sprawling, 52-minute speech to the House chamber, Paul lambasted U.S. government, politicians and special interests, declaring that the U.S. people must return to virtue before thegovernment allows them to be free, and that the Constitution has failed to limit the scope of an authoritarian bureaucracy.
“Our Constitution, which was intended to limit government power and abuse, has failed,” Paul said. “The Founders warned that a free society depends on a virtuous and moral people. The current crisis reflects that their concerns were justified.”
For the retiring Republican, 77, the “current crisis” isn’t quite what it is for other members of Congress, who routinely use that word to describe the economic recession that followed the 2008 financial crash. To the Texas Republican, that’s part of it, but the causes are deeper, and it’s also a crisis of governmental authoritarianism and the vanishing of personal liberty.
“If it’s not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis, we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties,” said Paul, an obstetrician-gynecologist by training.
Cardinal George: The very real dangers of being on the wrong side of things.
Eternity enters into human history in often incomprehensible ways. God makes promises but gives no timelines.
Visiting the shrine at Fatima, pilgrims enter a huge plaza, with the spot of the apparitions marked by a small chapel to one side, a large church at one end, an equally large adoration chapel at the other end, and a center for visitors and for the hearing of confessions. Just outside the main grounds, a section of the Berlin Wall has been re-built, a stark witness to what Mary had talked about almost a century ago. Communism in Russia and its satellite nations has collapsed, although many of its sinful effects are still with us.
Communism imposed a total way of life based upon the belief that God does not exist. Secularism is communism’s better-scrubbed bedfellow.
A small irony of history cropped up at the United Nations a few weeks ago when Russia joined the majority of other nations to defeat the United States and the western European nations that wanted to declare that killing the unborn should be a universal human right.
Who is on the wrong side of history now?
USCCB releases latest U.S. Catholic Church statistics
Statistics
Statistics on the number of bishops and dioceses are updated on a regular basis on this site. Other statistics listed here:
- Clergy and Religious
- Laity and Parishes
- Catholic Education
- Catholic Health Care and Social Services
- Catholic Lay Organizations
- Church Finances
For other current statistical information, please contact us.
The sad State of the Union – 2012
Reflecting now on the Fourth of July 2012, we have to wonder about a regime now manifesting a growing list of abuses to the fundamental nature of human worth. These abuses are put into effect by elected rulers themselves. They are accepted by many citizens who themselves are “democratic” in the classic Greek sense, that in their soul they have little principle of order.
Hence, they have no reason to object to anything on any other basis than that of personal whim or want. The term “unconstitutional” is meaningless. This situation is not a far cry from that list found in the Declaration. In describing these abuses, it read: “He (the King) has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.” “He has refused to assent to Laws.” And “He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution.”
Fortnight for Freedom Issue #3: Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput speaks about religious freedom.
First, religious freedom is a cornerstone of the American experience. This is so obvious that once upon a time, nobody needed to say it. But times have changed. So it’s worth recalling that Madison, Adams, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson–in fact, nearly all the American founders–saw religious faith as vital to the life of a free people. Liberty and happiness grow organically out of virtue. And virtue needs grounding in religious faith.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian, put it this way: The founders knew that in a republic, “virtue is intimately related to religion. However skeptical or deistic they may have been in their own beliefs, however determined they were to avoid anything like an established Church, they had no doubt that religion is an essential part of the social order because it is a vital part of the moral order.”
Here’s my second point: Freedom of religion is more than freedom of worship. The right to worship is a necessary but not sufficient part of religious liberty. Christian faith requires community. It begins in worship, but it also demands preaching, teaching, and service. It’s always personal but never private. And it involves more than prayer at home and Mass on Sunday–though these things are vitally important. Real faith always bears fruit in public witness and public action. Otherwise it’s just empty words.
The founders saw the value of publicly engaged religious faith because they experienced its influence themselves. They created a nation designed in advance to depend on the moral convictions of religious believers, and to welcome their active role in public life.
Participate in Fortnight for Freedom activities near you
Participate in the Virtual Vigil for Religious Freedom
More of the same in Syria: Wherever the US and its NATO allies have intervened to change regimes in the Middle East, Christians are the first to be targeted (and killed)
Christians are being systematically targeted for genocide in Syria according to Vatican and other sources with contacts on the ground among the besieged Christian community. According to reports by the Vatican’s Fides News Agency collected by the Centre for the Study of Interventionism, the US-backed Free Syrian Army rebels and ever more radical spin-off factions are sacking Christian churches, shooting Christians dead in the street, broadcasting ultimatums that all Christians must be cleansed from the rebel-held villages, and even shooting priests.
French Bishop Philip Tournyol Clos, a greek-Catholic Melkite Archimandrite, traveled through Syria and, according to the Holy See’s press agency, reported back that Western press was spreading disinformation about the real nature of the uprising in Syria and thereby prolonging and deepening the conflict.
The madness that engulfed Robespierre’s France, the communist frenzy that shut down religious practice in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe — all of this can indeed be repeated here unless believers link arms in a common cause.
This short history of Catholicism in the United States, during times of great peril, both from within and without, reveals not only the essential goodness of the American people, but the providential hand of Almighty God.
Many of the events you will read about here are both unlikely and implausible, yet all are quite true. Don’t miss a word of it.
May God have mercy on those who fail to learn these essential lessons of history!
A timely article by Frederick W. Marks of the New Oxford Review
Submitted by Bob Stanley
A short history of Catholicism (and anti-Catholicism) in the United States
Catholics, generally viewed as completely loyal to the pope—a religious ruler living on another continent of the “Old World”—were labeled as disloyal. How was it possible, many asked, for one to be loyal to the basic precepts of American life—namely democracy, republicanism, and a sense of openness and freedom—while simultaneously holding allegiance to a religious institution that never ascribed to these basic principles? Throughout the 19th century, Americans believed that Catholics could not negotiate this balance—being loyal to both Rome and Washington—and, therefore, could not be both a good American and a faithful Catholic.
Latest data shows only 22% of U.S. Catholics regularly attend Sunday Mass.
Visit the site for many comprehensive Catholic statistics
Submitted by Bob Stanley
Turns out Obama is wrong. The U.S. really is a Christian nation … and by a big margin!
Submitted by Bob Stanley
President Barack Hussein Obama, what is it about “The Bill of Rights” you don’t understand?
by Doug Lawrence
The people who founded the United States of America were intimately familiar with tyrants, along with all their petty, self-serving and unjust edicts. They also knew that the only answer to such edicts and the people who made them was a firm and resounding “NO”!
The Revolutionary War was fought in order to give a permanent and particular kind of life to that “no” … and as a warning to petty despots … anywhere and everywhere … that there is now a “free people” on the earth who will accept nothing less than liberty, and who will also be quite happy to give their lives in defense of the God-given rights of all.
But many of our contemporaries seem to think the founding fathers were wrong, that the God-given rights that they so painstakingly enumerated, defined, and enshrined were somehow inadequate, that those rights lacked a divine origin, in fact … and that what we Americans know as “The Bill of Rights” and “The U.S. Constitution” should somehow be reformed or replaced with something more to their liking.
They even go so far as to label those who choose to uphold and defend the traditional rights of all Americans as “mean-spirited bigots” … while at the same time, attempting to rewrite the very history of our great country.
In an attempt to besmirch the reputations of the founding fathers … while trumpeting the cause of “diversity” … these shameless anarchists happily point out that all of the founding fathers … without exception … were men!
In an attempt to undermine the divine basis of the God-given rights that we Americans, and by extension … all human beings possess … they love to trot out (and have been quietly working for generations to codify) an imaginary, totally non-existent “wall of separation between church and state”.
In an attempt to “sneak” all of this by the American people, they have succeeded in “dumbing down” the younger generations through their successful infiltration of the teachers unions and their subversion of the primary and secondary school systems.
Our great universities have become havens for an outspoken “protected class” of “secular theologians” … godless professors … many of whom are avowed Marxists and blatant, outright haters of the American way … who, at great expense … and with considerable pomp and circumstance … churn out mindless hordes, formed in their own image and likeness, lacking any sense of who they really are, where they actually came from, or what their actual rights, responsibilities and potential as “free people” … might truly be!
Hollywood and the mainstream media grow fat by feeding this massive group of clueless sycophants a steady diet of mental “pap” and “pablum”, while corporate America grows rich … keeping them busy and quite off balance … by “stoking the fires” of their mindless personal quest for money, approval, and influence (as opposed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)
Fortunately, recent events have served to bring all these things to light, in the presidency and the particularly corrupt regime of one Barack Hussein Obama, who in his notorious speaking engagement at the formerly Catholic, Notre Dame University, unwittingly became the national “poster boy” for all of the abuses mentioned above (and unfortunately, many, many more.)
The only answer to tyrants like Barack Obama, to all those of his political party, and to all his political operatives, no matter under which rock they might presently be be hiding … is a firm, unyielding “NO”. And the best place to firmly register that “NO” is at the ballot box, come November.
As for the specific “whys” … have a look at “The Bill of Rights”!
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Weblog 