Regular Contributions
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…
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…
Is America Just a Protestant Botch?
Read the latest from WFF Board Member Chris Manion. (Hat tip: Crisis Magazine)
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…
