Cardinal Dolan at Notre Dame

On May 19th, Cardinal Timothy Dolan delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame.

Here is the address in its entirety:



The full text of Cardinal Dolan's address can be found HERE.

Andrew Hendrix, "Your table is ready."

Good things come to those who wait!

Everett Golson no longer enrolled at Notre Dame

Stunned and Speechless.

That is what I am right now.

Taken in tandem with the departure of star QB prospect Gunnar Kiel, this development is devastating news for the Notre Dame football program which will now take a step back after so much progress last year.

The story:

Everett Golson, the quarterback who helped lead Notre Dame to last season’s BCS National Championship Game, is no longer a member of the Fighting Irish, according to multiple reports. A Notre Dame spokesperson confirmed to WNDU.com that the sophomore passer is not currently enrolled at the school...

Continued

The Case Against Redefining Marriage in 90 Seconds

Have you put up your flag?

New orthodox Catholic college for Ireland

Nicholas Healy, the former president of Ave Maria University, will assist efforts underway in Ireland to found a new orthodox Catholic liberal arts college.

From The Ave Herald:

 Former Ave Maria University President Nick Healy is somber as he cites example after example of how Ireland is slipping farther and farther away from its Catholic heritage.

"Ireland once supplied priests, missionaries and educators all over the world," he said, "Now, there are only 21 seminarians in the entire country – not even one for each diocese. There has been poor catechesis for two generations, and the country was unprepared for the secularization pressure brought on by membership in the European Union. Then the sex abuse crisis caused a further loss of faith in the Church in Ireland."

He sees one way to partially counteract that trend would be the establishment of a private, faithful Catholic college in Ireland, and he's signed on to help in an Irish group's effort to do that.

Mr. Healy said in an interview that he was approached over a year ago by "a group of priests, educators and lay people in Ireland" who were impressed by the type of American Catholic colleges that, like AMU and 21 other schools, are recommended by the Cardinal Newman Society in its Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College as offering a faithful, Catholic education.

"They saw the intellectual and moral foundation of these schools, and there was nothing like that in Ireland," he said.

"The deeper I got into it, the more convinced I was of the need."

Mr. Healy spent decades involved in Catholic higher education in the United States after leaving a successful career as a maritime lawyer, beginning at Franciscan University in Steubenville and then working with Tom Monaghan during the first phase of the founding and development of Ave Maria University.

Mr. Healy will be spending his time on the school's initial challenge of raising enough money to purchase a facility and begin recruiting staff and faculty. A site with appropriate buildings has been identified in the Cork area, he said, but he said that the group now needs to raise at least $8 million by the end of September, of which it currently has about $1 million committed, most of it from an anonymous donor in the United States.

The U.S. will be the focus of the fund-raising campaign, Mr. Healy said.

There are about 40 million people in the U.S. who have Irish heritage, he said, and he'll be targeting those who are "grateful for the faith handed down by their Irish ancestors and grateful for what Ireland has done for the world."
If established, the school would be different from most higher education institutions in Ireland, and not just because of its religious affiliation, Mr. Healy said.

"The type of liberal arts education with a core curriculum, such as what is used at Ave Maria University, is virtually unknown in Ireland," he said. "And Ireland needs a Catholic intellectual center," which Mr. Healy said was part of Tom Monaghan's vision for what Ave Maria University could become. Mr. Healy said he's spoken to Mr. Monaghan about the Irish project, but the AMU founder has no involvement in it.

The school likely would be named Newman College, for Blessed John Henry Newman, who started the Catholic University of Ireland in the mid 19th century, an effort that Mr. Healy said lasted just eight years when it failed to win support of either the Irish bishops or the British Crown.

A lot is at stake for Ireland, he said.

"Irish culture has been so Catholic. If the country loses the Catholic faith, eventually it will lose the culture."

Kermit Gosnell - Guilty of 1st Degree Murder

Quote of the Day:

Kermit Gosnell got the verdict he deserved — his wanton cruelty in killing born-alive infants and his callous disregard for the women who came to him are revolting. What he did violated the law, and the jurors are to be congratulated for doing their duty.

But, though he did appalling things, it is dangerous to demonize him. Gosnell is not out of the ordinary. He operated in a society that permits the dismemberment of the same infants so long as they are in their mother’s womb, a society that abandons women to abortion as the solution for unplanned or unwanted pregnancies and calls that “empowerment.” In some ways, what he did is a logical consequence of a society that permits such things.
Gosnell demonstrates what can happen to us — to an entire society — if we forget that every human being, regardless of age or location or disability or anything else, is one of us. Each human being deserves all the care and protection that any of us do. When we start to see some humans as fundamentally unequal, as being fit subjects for lethal violence, we begin a process of dehumanization that, in a kind of twisted logic, leads to the horrors Kermit Gosnell committed.

We must guard against a natural tendency to think that this verdict closes the chapter on these horrors. While it does mark the end of the actual trial of Gosnell, it marks the beginning, in a sense, of the trial of the rest of us. What lessons will we learn? What will we do to make our society more just and more compassionate?

— William Saunders is senior vice president of legal affairs and senior counsel at Americans United for Life.

SOURCE

Video: "Notre Dame Right to Life"

 The University of Notre Dame student pro-life group, Notre Dame Right to Life, has released the following promotional video which takes a look at their important work on the Notre dame campus and in the local community: 

Prince Harry visits wounded America soldiers...

...at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.



Prince Harry also paid his respects at Arlington National Cemetery:

The story of his visit to the cemetery appears HERE.

Did the Obama Administartion intentionally mislead the American people on nature of the Benghazi attack.

According to multiple news sources there is growing evidence that the Obama's Administration's botched account of last year's attack on the US embassy was not an oversight or an error, but rather an intentional deception on the part of high-level officials in the Administration. 

Pete Wehner of Commentary:

...My first reaction–which I spoke about on Friday during my appearance on the panel discussion on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier–was that the story is explosive, largely because Hayes’s story provides much in the way of new information.

It provides fresh evidence that, in the words of Hayes, “senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults [on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi on September 11, 2012].” (Emphasis added).

We now know, for example, that the early talking points were accurate–and it was only after the State Department and the White House, among others, got done revising the talking points that the truth was transformed into a false account.

To be specific: early (accurate) references to “Islamic extremists” were removed. Early (accurate) references to “attacks” were changed to “demonstrations.” And there was no mention of any YouTube video in any of the many drafts of the talking points–even though everyone from the president of the United States to the secretary of state to the U.N. ambassador blamed the video for the attacks.

The Benghazi scandal has always been multi-layered. There was the near-criminal negligence before and during the assault on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, when pleas for more security prior to the attacks and assistance during the attacks were denied. And then there were the misleading accounts after the attacks.

It now seems clear, based on the reporting by Steve Hayes and the accounts of those who were key actors during the attacks, that the accounts of the attacks by the Obama administration were not simply wrong; they were knowingly and willfully wrong. Which turns a mistake into a lie.

For the president and his team, there was probably both ideology and self-interest at play. To take them in order: This is the latest example of the Obama administration living in a fantasy world of its own making, in which Islamic extremism barely exists and poses no real threat to America. We saw it in the aftermath of the Ft. Hood massacre, where a jihadist attack (by Major Nidal Hasan) was said to be an example of “workplace violence.” They refuse to call evil by its name. 

But it’s also obvious that the president and his administration wanted to advance a storyline that al-Qaeda was in retreat. The Benghazi attacks eviscerated that claim–and so the president and his team decided to disfigure the facts, to mislead the American people, to fit their story and advance their political interests. Barack Obama had an election to win–and so he had a scandal to hide...

If these accusations prove to be true, the Administration should be completely and permanently discredited in the eyes of the American people.  Given the life and death nature of the Benghazi situation, as well as the national security implications, the villainy of those complicit in this scandal far exceeds that of Watergate.

The Congress also needs to thoroughly look at the Administration's immediate response to the attack to see if the failure to mount a rescue effort was connected in any way to a desire to downplay the nature and significance of the attack.

The Administration, steeped in Chicago-style politics can be expected to fight this to the end, attacking and smearing its opponents along the way.  The mainstream media can also be expected to soften the blow as much as possible by slanting the coverage of the scandal.

If information should emerge that President Obama was complicit in this cover up, he should be impeached for treason, in that he and his Administration gave comfort to the enemy by transferring blame from the enemy to, of all potential culprits, an unrelated video.

I do not raise the issue of impeachment lightly, but if the President was involved in this deception and coverup, he should lose all credibility and standing as leader of these United States.

Education: Increased funding does not equal increased performance

Over at National Review I stumbled upon this fascinating chart:

"I think he is the most talented and fearless Republican politician I’ve seen in the last 30 years."

James Carville is very impressed with Texas senator Ted Cruz and thinks Cruz will be a force to be reckoned with in the 2016 presidential election:



Source

Lila Rose on The O'Reilly Factor

Pro-life activist Lila Rose, who is only 24 years old, is driving the national abortion debate this week.

Her influence shows the extent to which a single, determined individual can make a difference.

Here she is on the O'Reilly Factor discussing the scandal of late-term abortion.  Her non-profit organization, Live Action,  has just released undercover videos that the infanticide horrors that came to light in the Gosnell case are not unique to his case.

Babies Born Alive During Abortion

LifeSiteNews has published a heartbreaking 4-part series "about how babies are born alive during abortion procedures."

In many cases, such babies actively killed by the abortion doctor or worse simply left to die.

Part I: ‘This baby is alive!’: the heartbreaking story of Baby Hope

Part II: ‘That’s not a baby. That’s an abortion!’: clinic workers describe babies born alive

Part III: ‘This is so hard. Oh, God, it’s so hard!’: nurses tell of aborted babies born alive

‘Hey, he’s trying to live, help him!’: Pro-choice pastor saw ‘aborted’ baby born alive

The link between contraception and abortion

Contrary to the claims of pro-abortion activists, more contraception leads to more abortions, not less.

From LifeSiteNews:

...Echoing the oft-used pro-contraception argument of the abortion giant Planned Parenthood Doughart concluded: “I don’t see how both a practicable and philosophically-defensible argument against contraception can be made by anyone who is genuinely interested in reducing abortion.” 

Abortion advocates link contraception to abortion

But adamant abortion advocates don’t agree with Doughart’s conclusion, pointing out that a link does indeed exist between contraception and demand for abortion. 

“Most abortions result from failed contraception,” admitted Joyce Arthur, founder and executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, earlier this year. 

Arthur’s statement parallels a prediction made in 1973 by Dr. Malcolm Potts, former medical director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, who said: “As people turn to contraception, there will be a rise, not a fall, in the abortion rate.” 

What Arthur and Potts have perhaps unwittingly revealed is the massively lucrative ‘get rich quick’ scheme of the multi-billion dollar abortion industry: 1) encourage unrestricted sexual activity among young people, 2) promote the idea of “safe sex” without consequences especially through using contraception, 3) expect contraception to fail since every method, be it the condom, pill, intrauterine device, etc., has a startlingly dismal failure rate in real world usage, 4) provide abortions to women as a solution to their ‘unexpected problem’.

Researchers have exposed this ingenious business plan of the abortion industry simply by following the money. They found that contraception is the gateway mechanism for increasing abortion. And abortion is where the profit is. 

Analysts have exposed the abortion-centered nature in the case of Planned Parenthood’s business model, finding in the organization’s own billion dollar financial reports that abortions account for more than half its income. 

Experts say contraception necessitates abortion

The United State’s highest court had no difficulty in seeing the causal link between contraception and abortion in a 1992 ruling that confirmed Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that brought legal abortion to America. 

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court argued that in some critical respects abortion is of the same character as the decision to use contraception: “...for two decades of economic and social developments, [people] have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” 

What the Supreme Court pointed out is that in a contracepting society, abortion not only becomes a necessity, but it becomes the ultimate fail-safe method of birth control. In the mind of the court, contraception doesn’t lessen the need for abortion, but on the contrary, contraception precipitates abortion. 

One woman, writing at the pro-abortion website RHRealityCheck.com last year, expressed her bewilderment at the failure of her intrauterine device. Confirming the validity of what the Supreme Court said, she described the process that led her to “fix” the problem by having her baby aborted. 

“Something went wrong, but now there are steps to fix it,” wrote the woman who identified herself as NW. “Yes, I’m pregnant, but it’s a temporary state. I can see the day on the calendar when it won’t be true anymore.” 
“I go with Planned Parenthood,” writes NW. “I spend so much of my time defending them and giving money monthly, it seems only right to maintain my loyalty in my moment of need.” 

Dr. Dianne Irving, a bioethicist at Georgetown University and a former bench biochemist with the U.S. National Institute of Health, would have no trouble explaining NW’s series of choices that led to the demise of her growing baby. 

“Since it is ... a long-recognized and documented scientific fact that almost all so-called ‘contraceptives’ routinely fail at statistically significant rates resulting in ‘unplanned pregnancies’, is there any wonder that elective abortions are socially required in order to take care of such ‘accidents’?” Dr. Irving asked. 

“Thus abortion has become a ‘contraceptive’ in and of itself,” she said.

Dr. Janet Smith, a professor, author, and national speaker, agrees with Dr. Irving: "Contraception leads us to believe that sex can be a momentary encounter, not a life-long commitment. It has brought about the concept of 'accidental pregnancy.'" 

“The connection between contraception and abortion is primarily this: contraception facilitates the kind of relationships and even the kind of attitudes and moral characters that are likely to lead to abortion,” she wrote.  
Put differently, contraception radically changes the meaning and purpose of sex. Contraception turns the sexual act between a man and a woman that is biologically ordered towards the creation of a new life into a parody of the act, where a newly created life can suddenly be viewed as an uninvited and unwelcome guest. Abortion becomes the easy solution by which the parent permanently and violently disinvites the unwelcome guest. 

Sarah Nelson is one woman who discovered within her own heart that her acceptance of contraception instilled in her what she called a “spirit of abortion”. Sarah always considered herself to be pro-life, but she was also in favor of contraception. She had been raised among protestants who openly encouraged newly weds to contracept. 
“Rarely were children talked about in terms of ‘abundance and overflowing joy’, she said. Some of her mentors strongly suggested that couples should limit their family size “for the good of God”.

One day after praying for an end to abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Sarah became aware of an anti-life mentality that had insidiously rooted itself deep within her. She saw that this mentality had prejudiced her against valuing new human life and that it was responsible for blocking her own desire one day to have children of her own. She realized that this mentality came from her uncritical acceptance of contraception. 

“I was not really open to having children, nor had I been encouraged to be so from my church leadership,” she said. “From this flowed the natural conclusion that contraception was fine. And if contraception was fine, then I could see how the logic worked that allowed abortion (God forbid) to be fine because it got rid of an ‘inconvenience,’” she said. 

“I was horrified as I suddenly and instantly knew the horrible truth: being closed to life through contraception actually leads to the reality and horror of abortion,” she said. 

Research suggests high contraception rates only increase abortion rates

Research backs up the causal link between contraception and abortion. 

A 2011 Spanish study found that as use of contraceptive methods increased in a sample of more than 2000 Spanish women (49.1% to 79.9%), the rate of abortion in the group doubled in the same period. 

The researchers were clearly puzzled by the findings of their 10-year study, calling it “interesting and paradoxical” that the large increase in elective abortions was associated with a remarkable increase in the number of women who used contraceptive methods. 

Research from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute showed in 2011 that a majority of abortions took place in America after contraception failure: “54 percent of women who have abortions had used a contraceptive method [usually condom or the pill] during the month they became pregnant.”

The former Planned Parenthood associate also found that “[p]oor women’s high rate of unintended pregnancy results in their also having high — and increasing — rates of both abortions (52 per 1,000) and unplanned births (66 per 1,000).”

A 2012 Russian study found that while Russian women had the highest rate of contraceptive use when compared to surrounding countries, they also had the highest abortion rate. 

The researchers were clearly perplexed when they found “higher odds of modern contraception” led to a “higher level of abortion,” calling their findings “contradictory,” “unexpected,” and “paradoxical.”

Like the researchers in the Russian study, Swedish officials were baffled earlier this year by statistics showing a rise in the country’s abortion rate following the introduction of the abortifacient morning after pill. Despite sales in the pill having doubled between 2001 and 2012, the abortion rate approximately within the same period was seen to have increased from 18.4 to 20.9 per 1,000 women...

The Boston Marathon bombing and the long-running clash between East and West

AN INTERESTING THOUGHT:

The original marathon — the race Pheidippides ran to bring to Athens the news of the Greek victory over the Persians — took place on the fault line between two civilizations. John Stuart Mill said that, had Darius prevailed, the civilization of Europe and the West would have been nipped in the bud. “The battle of Marathon,” he wrote, “even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings.” Had the Persians gained the victory at Marathon, the new forms of individualism and freedom that developed in Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries b.c. might have been crushed, and what Arendt called the “conformism, behaviorism, and automatism” of Persia might have prevailed. In fact, the novel freedoms of Greece survived, however imperfectly, in the West, and over time a spiritual culture that insisted on the value and dignity of every individual enlarged and extended them.

Today much of the world has embraced these freedoms, or is trying to. But Monday’s bombings suggest that the differences between East and West remain profound, however impolitic it may be to say so. It is only natural that we are as proud of our own free and tolerant society as Pericles was of the freedoms of Athens, that “city open to all the world.” But there is a tendency to complacency in our self-satisfaction; liberty, after all, is the exception, not the rule, in human history, and our own could quite easily disappear. I doubt the bombers were conscious of the historic meaning of the marathon they attacked, but the ease with which they repudiated the freedoms that Marathon stands for and that all subsequent marathons commemorate should give us pause, particularly if, as seems all but certain, the Tsarnaev brothers were the culprits. For they had benefited, in America, from this free way of life and still they turned against it.

SOURCE

US Marines bring comfort to Boston terror victims

Quite a moving scene:  A United States Marine double-amputee comforts a Boston terror victim who lost her legs in the attack:

Gosnell, Abortion, and Sex

There is a good piece about the Gosnell trial at the CatholicVote site today.  Written by Steve Skojec, the title of the essay says it all:   

How America Created a Monster: Gosnell & Our National Sex Obsession

An extended excerpt:

...it’s appropriate for the President to comment on significant tragedies within the country he leads, even unsolved or unconcluded ones.

Of course, we know why he won’t talk about it. It throws his own voting history into question. It highlights, in a very unflattering way, his position on human life.

As the pressure stays on, and the story comes to the attention of more Americans, some are no doubt asking how the Gosnell situation happened. How have we, as a nation, reached a point where something so horrific was taking place right under our noses?

I have a theory: we created this problem through our collective, national obsession with sex.

This condition afflicts people without concern for race or creed, and it dehumanizes us. It starts by disassociating sex from procreation through contraception. Whereas marriage as a social institution was once predicated upon the idea of family-building, providing a stable environment for the raising of those children that were considered the proper fruit of the conjugal act, there is now only state-sanctioned sex, accompanied by a handful of legal rights. Of course, many have wised up to the fact that the commitment of marriage is overrated if they can just as easily have sex in whatever adult, consensual arrangement they wish to enter into.  Freed of the stigma of out-of-wedlock birth, sex has shrugged off its social taboos that once confined it to marriage. Fornication is the new normal. Virginity before marriage is increasingly considered cause for pity, even scorn.

The upshot of all of this is that people have, by and large, ceased to be lovers, though they may feel something akin to love. They have instead become “sexual partners” — objects for the provision of pleasure, merely to be discarded when boredom sets in, or when someone new, more exciting, younger, or more attractive comes along. Sex isn’t for family anymore, so it certainly isn’t for keeps. We have decided it’s better to keep our options open.

And so we continue to objectify and devalue each other with bacchanalian abandon. Our casual views on sex have lead, unsurprisingly, to a society that is riddled with free, easily accessible pornography, which afflicts even those trying to live good lives and have healthy marriages. Talk to any priest about the sin he hears confessed most, and that one rises to the top of the list. Talk to those who have struggled with it, and the shame and helplessness that they feel in their encounters with this incredibly powerful appetite and the ease with which it can be fed, seemingly consequence-free, is apparent. But we know all too well that an erasure of web browser history does not similarly wipe clean the consequences for our souls, or, perhaps, for our humanity. Something inside us knows, even as our entertainment, educational institutions, and medical professionals try to assure us that porn usage and masturbation are healthy and normal, that something about these things is deeply wrong.

Still, in line with our national embrace of prurience, the FCC is now seeking to loosen decency standards for television and radio content. According to The Hill‘s Brendan Sasso, “The commission asked for input on how it should handle expletives and brief non-sexual displays of nudity. The rules only cover broadcast TV and radio stations—not cable, satellite or Internet content.” The needle moves, gradually but constantly, toward depravity.

As we become increasingly comfortable with viewing other human beings as sex objects, we should not be surprised that human sex trafficking, too, is an enormous problem in the US. It is widely reported that the Superbowl is ranked as the single biggest sex-trafficking event in the world. The nation that is world-famous for fighting a war about slavery remains one of the biggest consumers of slaves — of which, there are an estimated 27 million worldwide, an all-time high.

Orwell knew when he wrote 1984 how important licentiousness was to the building and maintaining of a totalitarian society. Aldous Huxley showed us the same thing in Brave New World. From grammar-school “erotic play” to the pornographic “feelies,” from the widespread distribution of contraceptives to the complete biological and psychological separation of sex and procreation, we were warned by these early-20th century literary prophets that it is sex, not religion, that is the opiate of the masses. As our liberties are taken away, we become increasingly sexually libertine, in seemingly direct inverse proportion. But who cares about religious liberty or the 2nd Amendment if the fleshpots are free?

If consequence-free sex is the norm, there are bound to be…consequences. Abortion and sex are inextricably related. You don’t have the former without the latter. What happens when, despite our best application of scientific barriers to conception, nature still finds a way? What happens when, horror of horrors, a girl actually gets pregnant? We don’t want them “punished with a baby,” do we? Let’s not kid ourselves: once we are accustomed to looking at people as objects, it’s a whole lot easier to kill them.

This is how we arrive at the present moment. This is how we have come to Gosnell, and a media unwilling to talk about the nauseating evil he was capable of. As Charles Krauthammer recently said, “the fact that it’s not covered is very easily explained. It puts the pro-abortion forces in a very bad light. It brings the issue of late term abortion starkly into relief.” And our President, and most of the mainstream media, are abortion promoters.

We have suppressed decency for so long that we have effectively killed it. We have so accustomed ourselves to the selfish pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of difficulty and inconvenience that we objectify human life without hesitation.  We have so powerfully numbed our consciences to the reality of abortion that we can live with it, and in many cases, even embrace it. Even those of us who abhor abortion have no choice but to spend every day living, working, and continuing on as normal in a country that has eradicated the equivalent of roughly 17% of the current US population. 54,000,000+ children have been murdered since Roe. To put that in perspective: that’s more than all the American soldiers killed in every war, conflict, and military operation we’ve been involved in since the American Revolution — by a factor of forty...

Happy Birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict

Benedict turned 86 years of age today!

A nice birthday review from RomeReports:

John Jalsevac, of LifeSiteNews, takes a cold-hard look at the absurdity of the pro-abortion position in light of the Gosnell trial:

...while reports about the nauseating conditions inside Gosnell’s abortion clinic aren’t doing much to inspire consumer confidence in the abortion industry, by far the worst thing for abortion supporters is the way the trial is laying bare for all to see the grotesque subversion of logic that lies at the heart of legalized abortion.

Gosnell, after all, faces the death penalty for allegedly killing newborn babies that, in many states, it would have been perfectly legal for him to kill a few minutes earlier. In fact, if he had killed the babies a few minutes earlier, the law in many states would have defended Gosnell’s actions as constitutionally protected 'healthcare.'

The abortionist’s crime isn’t therefore the fact that he killed these babies, but that he was too unskilled to kill them in the “right” way. Kill the baby one instant, and it is “reproductive healthcare.” Kill the baby the next instant, and it is capital murder. This is the outrageous contradiction created by legalized abortion...

SOURCE

Divine Mercy Sunday

For more information on the Divine Mercy, click HERE.

The Divine Mercy Chaplet is my favorite devotion.  Information about how to pray the Chaplet can be found HERE.

Who is actually bigoted in the marriage debate?

Ryan Anderson, co-author of the book  What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense,  provide a calm, respectful, and reasoned defense of traditional marriage.

However, look at the thinly disguised disdain with which Mr. Anderson is treated by the CNN's Piers Morgan and Susie Orman:



As for Ms. Orman's claim that Mr. Anderson is "uneducated,"  Denny Burke notes (via Thomas Peters):

...Ryan Anderson graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Princeton University and he’s a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Notre Dame. He just co-authored a book that is probably the definitive case for traditional marriage. He’s a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an all-around brilliant guy. Whatever you want to think about Ryan Anderson, “uneducated” hits ridiculously wide of the mark...

I will add that character assassination (particularly assertions of bigotry and ignorance) is a typical tactic used by anti-traditional marriage activists to avoid debating the merits of their case.

Pope Francis - Easter Blessing

From the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:

 Pope Francis delivers his Easter blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city and the world) from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican March 31. (Catholic News Service photo/L'Osservatore Romano via Reuters)

Francis Meets Benedict

A wonderful and historic moment.  Unprecedented, and frankly surreal.

Sadly, Benedict looks quite frail.



The Vatican released the following statement regarding the meeting:

The helicopter landed in Castel Gandolfo heliport, at about 12:15 and the car with the retired Pope approached the helicopter landing site. The Holy Father alighted: he was accompanied by the Substitute [Secretary of State] Msgr. Becciu, by Msgr. Sapienza and Msgr. Alfred Xuereb. As the Pope alighted, the Pope Emeritus approached him and there was a moving embrace between the two. 

Then, there followed brief greetings with those other present—the bishop of Albano and the Director of the Pontifical Villas, Mr. Petrillo—they all got in the car: Pope Francis on the right…and the Pope emeritus on the left. Msgr. Georg Gänswein, who is Prefect of the Papal Household, travelled in the same car. And so, the car brought the two protagonists of this historic meeting to the elevators and they went up to the apartments and immediately went to the chapel for a moment of prayer.  

In the chapel, the Pope emeritus offered the place of honor to Pope Francis, but he said: “We are brothers,” and wanted them to kneel together in the same pew. After a short moment of prayer, they then went to the private library where, at about 12:30, the private meeting began. This is the Library where the Pope normally receives important guests in Castel Gandolfo. Pope Francis brought a beautiful icon as a gift for the Pope emeritus. It was an icon of Our Lady of Humility, as a gift for Benedict XVI's great humility. Their discussions ended at 13.15, lasting about 45 minutes. It should be noted, with regard to the clothing, which actually—as we mentioned earlier—the Pope emeritus wears a simple cassock white, without a sash and without a mantella: these are the two details which distinguish his clothing from that of Pope Francis who wears a mantella and sash.  

The two secretaries, and Msgr. Georg and Msgr. Xuereb, are expected to eat lunch with them. Thus the totally private and confidential meeting ended with the discussions in the Library. The Pope Emeritus will also accompany Pope Francis to the heliport, when the time comes for his return. Let us remember that this is not their first meeting: it is their first face-to-face meeting, but Pope Francis had many times already addressed his thoughts to the Pope emeritus, during his first appearance on the central Loggia, and then two personal calls: the night of his election and St. Joseph’s Day.  

Thus, the dialogue had already started, even though the personal, physical meeting had not yet taken place. Let us also remember that the retired Pope had already expressed his unconditional reverence and obedience to his successor at his farewell meeting with the Cardinals, February 28, and certainly in this [morning’s] meeting—which was a moment of profound and elevated communion—will have had the opportunity to renew this act of reverence and obedience to his successor, and certainly Pope Francis renewed his gratitude and that of the whole Church for Pope Benedict’s ministry during his pontificate.

   

SOURCE:  Catholic World Report

Photo (Vatican Radio):

Photo (Vatican radio):

Photo (AP):

 

Photo:  (AP/Osservatore Romano, HO) :

Pope Francis - Official Photograph

Today, the Vatican News Service released the official photograph of Pope Francis:

H/T:  Deacon's bench

Dominican Sisters celebrate new pope

This is beautiful!



The Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist have been a huge success story since their founding in 1997.  They have been blessed with an abundance of vocations and have grown from 4 sisters to over 115 in just fifteen years!

Trifecta!

From the folks at CatholicVote:

Pope Francis - Installation Mass - Homily

Below is the full text of the Pope Francis' homily given today at his Installation Mass:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

I thank the Lord that I can celebrate this Holy Mass for the inauguration of my Petrine ministry on the solemnity of Saint Joseph, the spouse of the Virgin Mary and the patron of the universal Church. It is a significant coincidence, and it is also the name-day of my venerable predecessor: we are close to him with our prayers, full of affection and gratitude.

I offer a warm greeting to my brother cardinals and bishops, the priests, deacons, men and women religious, and all the lay faithful. I thank the representatives of the other Churches and ecclesial Communities, as well as the representatives of the Jewish community and the other religious communities, for their presence. My cordial greetings go to the Heads of State and Government, the members of the official Delegations from many countries throughout the world, and the Diplomatic Corps.

In the Gospel we heard that “Joseph did as the angel of the Lord commanded him and took Mary as his wife” (Mt 1:24). These words already point to the mission which God entrusts to Joseph: he is to be the custos, the protector. The protector of whom? Of Mary and Jesus; but this protection is then extended to the Church, as Blessed John Paul II pointed out: “Just as Saint Joseph took loving care of Mary and gladly dedicated himself to Jesus Christ’s upbringing, he likewise watches over and protects Christ’s Mystical Body, the Church, of which the Virgin Mary is the exemplar and model” (Redemptoris Custos, 1).

How does Joseph exercise his role as protector? Discreetly, humbly and silently, but with an unfailing presence and utter fidelity, even when he finds it hard to understand. From the time of his betrothal to Mary until the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem, he is there at every moment with loving care. As the spouse of Mary, he is at her side in good times and bad, on the journey to Bethlehem for the census and in the anxious and joyful hours when she gave birth; amid the drama of the flight into Egypt and during the frantic search for their child in the Temple; and later in the day-to-day life of the home of Nazareth, in the workshop where he taught his trade to Jesus.

How does Joseph respond to his calling to be the protector of Mary, Jesus and the Church? By being constantly attentive to God, open to the signs of God’s presence and receptive to God’s plans, and not simply to his own. This is what God asked of David, as we heard in the first reading. God does not want a house built by men, but faithfulness to his word, to his plan. It is God himself who builds the house, but from living stones sealed by his Spirit. Joseph is a “protector” because he is able to hear God’s voice and be guided by his will; and for this reason he is all the more sensitive to the persons entrusted to his safekeeping. He can look at things realistically, he is in touch with his surroundings, he can make truly wise decisions. In him, dear friends, we learn how to respond to God’s call, readily and willingly, but we also see the core of the Christian vocation, which is Christ! Let us protect Christ in our lives, so that we can protect others, so that we can prote ct creation!

The vocation of being a “protector”, however, is not just something involving us Christians alone; it also has a prior dimension which is simply human, involving everyone. It means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world, as the Book of Genesis tells us and as Saint Francis of Assisi showed us. It means respecting each of God’s creatures and respecting the environment in which we live. It means protecting people, showing loving concern for each and every person, especially children, the elderly, those in need, who are often the last we think about. It means caring for one another in our families: husbands and wives first protect one another, and then, as parents, they care for their children, and children themselves, in time, protect their parents. It means building sincere friendships in which we protect one another in trust, respect, and goodness. In the end, everything has been entrusted to our protection, and all of us are responsible for it. Be protectors of God’s gifts!

Whenever human beings fail to live up to this responsibility, whenever we fail to care for creation and for our brothers and sisters, the way is opened to destruction and hearts are hardened. Tragically, in every period of history there are “Herods” who plot death, wreak havoc, and mar the countenance of men and women.

Please, I would like to ask all those who have positions of responsibility in economic, political and social life, and all men and women of goodwill: let us be “protectors” of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment. Let us not allow omens of destruction and death to accompany the advance of this world! But to be “protectors”, we also have to keep watch over ourselves! Let us not forget that hatred, envy and pride defile our lives! Being protectors, then, also means keeping watch over our emotions, over our hearts, because they are the seat of good and evil intentions: intentions that build up and tear down! We must not be afraid of goodness or even tenderness!

Here I would add one more thing: caring, protecting, demands goodness, it calls for a certain tenderness. In the Gospels, Saint Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man, a working man, yet in his heart we see great tenderness, which is not the virtue of the weak but rather a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for concern, for compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love. We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness!
Today, together with the feast of Saint Joseph, we are celebrating the beginning of the ministry of the new Bishop of Rome, the Successor of Peter, which also involves a certain power. Certainly, Jesus Christ conferred power upon Peter, but what sort of power was it? Jesus’ three questions to Peter about love are followed by three commands: feed my lambs, feed my sheep. Let us never forget that authentic power is service, and that the Pope too, when exercising power, must enter ever more fully into that service which has its radiant culmination on the Cross. He must be inspired by the lowly, concrete and faithful service which marked Saint Joseph and, like him, he must open his arms to protect all of God’s people and embrace with tender affection the whole of humanity, especially the poorest, the weakest, the least important, those whom Matthew lists in the final judgment on love: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison (cf. Mt 25:31-46 ). Only those who serve with love are able to protect!

In the second reading, Saint Paul speaks of Abraham, who, “hoping against hope, believed” (Rom 4:18). Hoping against hope! Today too, amid so much darkness, we need to see the light of hope and to be men and women who bring hope to others. To protect creation, to protect every man and every woman, to look upon them with tenderness and love, is to open up a horizon of hope; it is to let a shaft of light break through the heavy clouds; it is to bring the warmth of hope! For believers, for us Christians, like Abraham, like Saint Joseph, the hope that we bring is set against the horizon of God, which has opened up before us in Christ. It is a hope built on the rock which is God.

To protect Jesus with Mary, to protect the whole of creation, to protect each person, especially the poorest, to protect ourselves: this is a service that the Bishop of Rome is called to carry out, yet one to which all of us are called, so that the star of hope will shine brightly. Let us protect with love all that God has given us!
I implore the intercession of the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saints Peter and Paul, and Saint Francis, that the Holy Spirit may accompany my ministry, and I ask all of you to pray for me! Amen.

Source of text:  The Moynihan Letters.   

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Charity in Action - Pope Francis blesses disabled man

Very moving!'

Pope Francis - Sunday Angelus

Today, Pope Francis made a surprise appearance as the celebrant of Sunday Mass at the "local parish church" at the Vatican, St. Anna's, met with individual members of the public for the first time, and led the Sunday Angelus prayer.

Video highlights:



Full text of Angelus address:

Dear brothers and sisters, good morning! After our first meeting last Wednesday, today I again give my greetings to you all! And I am happy to do it on Sunday, the Lord's Day! This is beautiful and important for us Christians: to meet on Sunday, to greet one another, to talk as we are doing now, in the square. This square that, thanks to the media, takes on worldly dimensions.

In this Fifth Sunday of Lent, the Gospel presents us with the story of the adulterous woman whom Jesus saves from being condemned to death. It captures Jesus' attitude: we do not hear words of contempt, we do not hear words of condemnation, but only words of love, of mercy, that invite us to conversion. 'Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more!' Well, brothers and sisters! God's face is that of a merciful father who is always patient. Have you thought about God's patience, the patience that He has with each of us? That is His mercy. He always has patience, is always patient with us, understanding us, awaiting us, never tiring of forgiving us if we know how to return to him with a contrite heart. 'Great is the Lord's mercy', says the Psalm.

In these days, I have been able to read a book by a cardinal—Cardinal Kasper, a talented theologian, a good theologian—on mercy. And it did me such good, that book, but don't think that I'm publicizing the books of my cardinals. That is not the case! But it did me such good, so much good... Cardinal Kasper said that hearing the word mercy changes everything. It is the best thing that we can hear: it changes the world. A bit of mercy makes the world less cold and more just. We need to understand God's mercy well, this merciful Father who has such patience... Think of the prophet Isaiah who asserts that even if our sins were scarlet red, God's love would make them white as snow. That is beautiful, [this aspect of mercy]. I remember when, just after I was made bishop, in 1992, the Madonna of Fatima came to Buenos Aires and a large Mass for the sick was celebrated. I went to hear confessions at that Mass. Near the end of the Mass I got up because I had to administer a confirmation. An over 80-year-old woman came up to me, humbly, very humbly. I asked her: “Nonna,” [grandmother]—because that's how we address our elderly—“Nonna, you want to confess?” “Yes,” she told me. “But if you haven't sinned...” And she said to me: “We have all sinned...” “But perhaps the Lord will not forgive you...” “The Lord forgives everyone,” she told me, with certainly. “But how do you know that, ma'am?” “If the Lord didn't forgive everyone, the world would not exist.” I wanted to ask her: “Tell me, have you studied at the Gregorian [Pontifical University]?”, because that is the wisdom that the Holy Spirit gives: the inner wisdom of God's mercy. Let us not forget this word: God never tires of forgiving us, never! 'So, Father, what is the problem?' Well, the problem is that we get tired, we don't want to, we get tired of asking forgiveness. Let us never get tired. Let us never get tired. He is the loving Father who always forgives, who has that heart of mercy for all of us. And let us also learn to be merciful with everyone. Let us call upon the intercession of the Madonna who has held in her arms the Mercy of God made human. 

SOURCE OF TEXT:  Catholic World Report