Essays
Living A Catholic Life: What the Ratzinger Family Can Teach Us
March 1, 2012 saw the publication in English of Msgr. Georg Ratzinger’s new book My Brother, the Pope. Media outlets have widely reported this ultimate insider’s view of Pope Ratzinger and have published excerpts from the book. Of particular interest to this writer was Msgr. Ratzinger’s recollections of his childhood with his younger brother. The…
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…
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…
The Empire Builder (or, What I Saw on the Train)
Trains and Christmas go together. It has been so—at least in the United States—since the early part of the 20th century. It is not unusual to see a train encircling the Christmas tree, or to read a Christmas story or watch a Christmas movie with people traveling by train. There is a certain romance bound…
Christmas as Real History
Ed. Note. In this 2005 article authored by WFF President Charles E. Rice, he suggests to Notre Dame students and to all of us a new approach in considering Christmas. In the face of the secularization that continues to get worse with each passing year and in the midst of an increasingly hostile federal government…
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…