Posts
Of Lent Past, when Fasts Meant Fast, see what we’ve lost
From time to time I think there’s merit to re-evaluate where we are today against practices of the past. To comb the deposit of faith for gems that can illumine why we do things. Now that pre-lent is nearly gone, and we enter lent proper, I’m posting some passages about lent published in 1890 for your edification….
We Need a Miracle to Solve the Obamacare Mandates
Yesterday’s Gospel had the Pharisees asking Our Lord for a sign to prove that He was God. That Gospel ends noting that He and the Apostles left them and got into a boat. Then, in today’s Gospel, we hear that the Apostles “had forgotten to bring bread.” They must have been showing their disappointment and…
Obama’s “Accommodation”
The February 10th statement of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted that President Obama, in revising his health care mandate, “has decided to retain HHS’s nationwide mandate of insurance coverage of sterilization and contraception, including some abortifacients.” His decree “would still mandate that all insurers must include coverage for the objectionable services in…
The HHS Mandate: Obama Regime Claims the Prerogative of God
On January 20, 2012, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius ordered that, effective August 1, 2012, health insurance must cover preventive services including all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity, without charging a co-payment, co-insurance or a deductible. “Nonprofit employers,” said Sebelius, “who, based…
The Supreme Court and the Natural Law
In a recent commentary, Mr. John DeJak makes a clarion call to moor applied law to natural law via metaphysics. A clarion call it should be since applied constitutional law has in my view never been tethered to the natural law except by the narrowest of strands. In fact, the words “natural law” have not…
Waking the Sleeping Giant
One of the more memorable (and apocryphal) quotes to come out of the Second World War was the quote of Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander and mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the attack he was supposed to have said: “I fear all we have done is wake a sleeping giant and…
Judases
In the May-June 1973 edition of The Humanist featured an article by Paul Blanshard and Edd Doerr in which they stated: We feel like throwing a champagne dinner in honor of the U.S. Supreme Court for its January decision on abortion…The Blackmun decision, in which the only Catholic on the Court (Brennan) concurred, constitutes the…
Notre Dame’s Fr. Jenkins Wants to “Dialogue” When He Should Condemn
(picture courtesy of the Associated Press) The declining reputation of the flagship Catholic university in the United States continues. Since Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. cozied up with the most pro-abortion President in United States history two years ago, the University–in the person of her President–has been an open apologist for the leader of a post-Christian…
Metaphysics and Contraception
Recently a class of high school seniors that I teach read St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” from his magisterial Summa Theologiae. The students struggled through the work and great discussion was sparked over the topic of law generally and the natural law specifically. In leading the class through the discussion with several of my…
Spaceballs, Babylon, and the Lenten Sacrifice
by Guest Author, Major Adam E. Frey Like many Catholics, you may be making a last-minute scramble to choose a Lenten sacrifice. But in the rush to make your public penance, have you considered why you make this yearly ritual? Believe it or not, you might get a better understanding of the Lenten sacrifice by…