Roman Catholic

Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie: Transgender Activists, Cultural Revolution

Christian Marriage Sacrament by Deacon Keith Fournier –
The Gender Identity Movement demands the recognition of a ‘right’ to choose one’s gender and laws which accommodate, fund, and enforce such a ‘right’

The “Gender Identity Movement” is dangerous. It is a part of a broader Cultural Revolution which substitutes an entirely different view of the dignity of the human person, human freedom, human flourishing, human sexuality, marriage and the family and the moral basis of a free society than that which formed Western Civilization. […]

In the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Christians of Rome he writes of a progressive moral corruption which can occur to people who “while claiming to be wise become fools.” St. Paul pulls no punches saying of such people that they “exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” He also addresses the consequences of their immoral choices and actions.( Romans 1) In this strongly worded admonition, the Apostle is quite clear in affirming the early Church’s rejection of homosexual practices in a list of debased behaviors which grow out of moral corruption.

Anyone who maintains that there is no reference to the rejection of homosexual practices in the Bible has to remove this entire chapter and many other biblical references. They must also get rid of early Church documents which uniformly condemn homosexual practices. [Read more…]

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Catholic Teaching’s Pro-Union Bias

Rev. Robert A. Sirico
Rev. Robert A. Sirico

by Rev. Robert A. Sirico –

There is a long-standing bias in Catholic social teaching toward unions, and this dates from the long history of labor struggles for fair wages and safe working conditions. There is a romance associated with this history, and it is bound up with strong moral concerns. And it is not just historical. The Catholic Church played a heroic role in the fall of Communism in Poland through its influence on labor unions that were striking against oppression, which is to say state coercion.

Pope John Paul II, who knew something about the social role of labor unions, also warned about their drift into politics. In his encyclical Laborem Exercens, he wrote: “Unions do not have the character of political parties struggling for power; they should not be subjected to the decision of political parties or have too close links with them.”

The reality with all public affairs, however, is that conditions change. Just because something is called a union does not make it automatically good and moral. [Read more…]

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The Catholic Church and the Left

by Jack Kerwick –
My pastor’s homily was but the latest confirmation of that what many an astute observer has long observed: the “progressivism” of secular leftism has made sizable inroads into the Catholic Church. This is no mean feat. In fact, the significance of the left’s infiltration into this institution has gone largely unnoticed.

Whatever one may think of its theology and ecclesiology, the cold heart fact of the matter is that the Catholic Church is not just one more institution among others. Structurally and doctrinally, it is the emblem par excellence of the ancient world, a continual reminder to our generation that its life did not begin yesterday, and that Western civilization would be unrecognizable, and probably nonexistent, without it, the Catholic Church reminds us as well that we are living off of a cultural capital that was millennia in the making. Its unabashed affirmation of the centrality of tradition to right conduct, its hierarchical conception of authority, its exclusion of females and homosexuals from the priesthood, and its demand that its clergy take a vow of celibacy are some of the more salient respects in which the Catholic Church has not only distinguished itself from the leveling impulses of our age, but resisted them. [Read more…]

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The Miracle of Life – A Meditation on Mystery and Beauty of Life as we March

Miracle of Lifeby Msgr. Charles Pope –
The magnificence of life is really too wonderful to describe. But I found this description some years ago which summons reverence by its very ability to baffle the mind:

MIRACLE OF LIFE– Consider the miracle of the human body. Its chemistry is just as extraordinarily well tuned as is the physics of the cosmos. Our world on both sides of the divide that separates life from lifelessness is filled with wonder. Each human cell has a double helix library of three billion base pairs providing fifty thousand genes. These three billion base pairs and fifty thousand genes somehow engineer 100 trillion neural connections in the brain—-enough points of information to store all the data and information contained in a fifty-million-volume encyclopedia.

And then after that, these fifty thousand genes set forth a million fibers in the optic nerves, retinae having ten million pixels per centimeter, some ten billion in all, ten thousand taste buds, ten million nerve endings for smell, cells that exude a chemical come-on to lure an embryo’s lengthening neurons from spinal cord to target cell, each one of the millions of target cells attracting the proper nerve from the particular needed function. And all this three-dimensional structure arises somehow from the linear, one-dimensional information contained along the DNA helix. Did all this happen by chance or do you see the hand of God?

[Read more…]

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Why a Christian Anthropology Makes a Difference

by Peter Kreeft –
It is simply impossible to agree on ethics, on how to act, on what is good and what is not, if you disagree about metaphysics or anthropology. And since ethics is unavoidable, so is anthropology.

Of the two words in the term “Christian anthropology,” I assume that I don’t need to define the word Christian because the Church has been doing that for two thousand years – they’re called creeds. But what about anthropology?

By anthropology I mean simply a logos about anthropos, a theory or philosophy about mankind or human nature. I don’t mean the empirical science of anthropology. Everyone, absolutely everyone, needs a philosophical anthropology, especially everyone in the medical profession. But not everyone needs to be a scientific anthropologist, or to have an anthropologist, as everyone does need to have a physician. Everyone needs a physician, but not everyone needs a physicist. [Read more…]

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Bill O’Reilly Needs No-Spin Truth: Child in the Womb is Fully Human!

Child in Womb is Fully Human by Jennifer Hartline – The No-Spin Zone is once again in need of some actual truth. I tuned in on Friday night to hear Bill O’Reilly read a letter from a viewer in New York who asked him why he keeps referring to the fetus as a “potential human being.” This viewer reminded Bill that as a Roman Catholic, he should know better! How absolutely correct. O’Reilly, however, responded this way:

“I’m absolutely factually correct when I say a fetus is a potential human being and no one can deny that. I respect your opinion but until you become a Supreme Court Justice, it remains your opinion, your belief. I can’t run this program based upon my religious beliefs, so I try to put up arguments based on facts and I believe we are successful in doing that.”

Bill, in that one small paragraph you have gone so very, very wrong in so many ways.

It is not “factually correct” to say that a fetus is a “potential human being.” For starters, it isn’t scientifically correct. The fetus is an unrepeatable, unique human child, created from the joining of a woman’s egg and a man’s sperm, possessing a brand new DNA never before seen in the world. [Read more…]

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Killing the Holy Innocents: Governments that Fund Abortion are the New Herods

Holy Innocents by Dcn. Keith Fournier –

Every child killed by voluntary abortion is a “Holy Innocent”. Every politician who supports this killing, implicitly or explicitly, carries on the evil actions of Herod. On this Feast of the Holy Innocents let us summon a new resolve to bring an end to the slaughter of the holy innocents in this hour. Time to end the funding of Planned Parenthood and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. […]

On December 28 in the Octave of Christmas we commemorate the Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Catholic Church. The readings for the Mass remind us that evil has no respect for life. There is an ongoing struggle between life and death, darkness and light, and those of us called to continue the redemptive mission of Jesus, the Light of the world, are engaged in the conflict.

The first reading for the Mass of the Feast of the Holy Innocents is taken from the 1st letter of the beloved disciple John, ‘This is the message that we have heard from Jesus Christ and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.” (I John 5) [Read more…]

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The ‘Small’ God Who Brought Heaven Down to Earth

Rev. Robert A. Sirico
Rev. Robert A. Sirico

12/23/2010 – Rev. Robert A. Sirico –

That the eternal God should deign to co-mingle in time and space with humanity does tell us something, not about the ‘smallness’ of God, but about the inestimable dignity of the human person who is created in the image of the Lord of History. Thus it tells us about the importance of human history to eternity; of the relation of the visible world to the invisible one; and of the way the mortal life we each live here and now determines our immortal destiny. […]

Some years ago I found myself at a fashionable dinner party in Los Angeles where the lamb was roasted to perfection, and the deep, rich red Australian wine complimented it to a tee. The conversation around the dinner table was likewise high-minded and it did not take this largely secular gathering very long to turn their attention to the Christian sitting in their midst. With all the graciousness and condescension she could muster, my dining companion turned to me and said, “I am not a believer, of course, but I have long admired your Church’s care for the poor and suffering and the generosity and effectiveness of your social agencies who tend to human needs without regard to the belief or non-belief of the recipient.” [Read more…]

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The Glory of Humility

St. John the Baptist
St. John the Baptist

11/15/2010 – Deacon Douglas McManaman –
The word ‘human’ comes from the Latin ‘humus’, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’. Man is from the earth.

I often tell my students that what they learn in the course of a semester, in their math class, for example, or in their chemistry classes, or physics, etc., took centuries for the most brilliant human beings to uncover. Once it has been uncovered, however, it appears to be so simple. Why did it take so long? This is true especially for philosophy. It takes years and years to dispose the intellect to learn such abstract truths, and from these truths it is possible to go on to demonstrate, through reason alone, the existence of God, and it is also possible, through reason alone, to show that God is one, eternal, the source of all that is good and beautiful, that He is Beauty Itself, Goodness Itself, and Truth Itself. And when we finally come to see it, we inevitably think: “This is so clear and simple; why did it take years to get this?”

The reason is that human beings, by nature, are slow. We are the highest beings on the hierarchy of material beings, but we are the lowest beings on the hierarchy of God’s intellectual creatures. [Read more…]

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Democratic Ad: Catholic Church More Concerned About Abortion Than Poor

Democrat Ad Ignore the Poor10/26/2010 – Steven Ertelt –

A campaign postcard the Minnesota Democratic Party sent to voters in the Midwestern state is causing a strong reaction from pro-life advocates. It claims the Catholic Church is more concerned with abortion than helping the poor. The postcard features a large photo of a older but faceless Catholic priest holding a Bible and wearing the clearly-seen Roman Catholic collar.

The priest sports a campaign button in a red, white and blue motif with the words, “Ignore the Poor.”

The ad, in the estimation of National Catholic Register writer Matt Archbold is blatantly anti-Catholic and meant to tell voters the Catholic Church is more concerned about abortion than the plight of the poor.

“Sometimes there’s a little subtlety to anti-Catholic political rhetoric but not this time. This is in your face anti-Catholicism,” he said. “It’s anti-Catholicism is not one point of many. It’s the point.” [Read more…]

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