DeJak
The State says in its heart, ‘There is no God’
I recently attended the third annual Canon Law Conference for Canonists and Civil Attorneys hosted by His Eminence Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Truly, it was an excellent conference made all the more so by the opportunities for spiritual refreshment and prayer at arguably the…
Farm Subsidiarity and Obama
The wizards of smart in the Obama administration never cease to amaze. By now all thinking Catholics should realize that this administration is anything but friendly to the Church or her doctrines. Yet some still support the President claiming that his initiatives are consonant with Catholic Social Doctrine. Now comes the latest assault on common…
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…
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…
The Distributist Review: Seeking the Common Good
Special thanks to The Distributist Review for publishing my review of WFF Board Member Dr. Arthur Hippler’s Citizens of the Heavenly City: A Catechism of Catholic Social Teaching. You can read my review here. (Picture courtesy of The Distributist Review)
For University Students: Authentic Common Sense in An Age of Uncommon Nonsense
I just saw an ad for Google TV. It was entitled “Date Night.” The ad featured a man and a woman sitting on a couch together. The perspective of the viewer is seeing the backs of their heads. Both are watching a screen; playing on the screen is an obvious “romance” movie where a woman…
In memoria aeterna erunt justi: Remembering the Holy Souls
One of the curiosities of the Roman Calendar (or more properly, the calendar of the Roman Rite) is the dedication of the month of November to the Holy Souls in Purgatory. For many of us, these souls are also known as the Poor Souls in Purgatory–“poor” because of the sufferings they endure as the result…
