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Recently two outrageously anti-Catholic outbursts took place in the public forum.
The first was an article in the US News and World Report by syndicated columnist Jamie Stiehm. Ms. Stiehm argued that the Supreme Court was dangerously packed with Catholics, who have, she averred, a terribly difficult time separating church from state and who just can’t refrain from imposing their views on others.
Twenty-five years ago, on January 27, 1989, a joint statement from the communist government of Poland, the Solidarity trade union, and the Catholic Church announced a national “Roundtable” to discuss the country’s future, including major structural issues of political and economic reform.
The Roundtable began the following month; basic agreements were reached in April; partially-free elections, swept by Solidarity candidates, were held in June; and in September a Solidarity leader, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, became Poland’s first non-communist prime minister since World War II.
In The Offense of the Cross, W. A. Criswell points out, “The Roman Empire was the most tolerant, the most liberal, the most wise, and the most accurate in its handling of the many provinces and religions of its empire of any kingdom that ever existed. Men could worship, have temples, and do as they pleased.
“And yet the Roman Empire and the Caesars persecuted the Christians. Why? For one simple reason: the Christian refused to compromise his faith with any other religion whatsoever.”
That refusal to compromise is seen in the response of the apostles themselves to the command not to teach in the name of Jesus: “We will obey God rather than men!”
There are some common prayers that I pray by heart, such as the “Hail Mary,” the “Lord’s Prayer,” and the “Glory Be.”
They come to my mind automatically because I have prayed them so many times and I have them memorized. This is probably true for most Catholics.
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Seth MacFarlane, well known atheist and cartoonist, is the executive producer of the remake of Cosmos, a television series which recently made its national debut.
The first episode featured, along with the science, an animated feature about the 16th century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake by Church officials. A statue of Bruno stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on the spot where he was put to death.
In MacFarlane’s cartoon, Bruno is portrayed as a hero of modern science, and Church officials are, without exception, depicted as wild-eyed fanatics and unthinking dogmatists.
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It’s hard for me to believe it now, but in my younger years I cared nothing about antiques. I foolishly figured that anyone who furnished a home with them simply couldn’t afford new stuff.
Now, although I still don’t have them in my home, I find myself fascinated by anything with a “history.”
I can’t wait each week to watch public television’s Antiques Roadshow. I guess you could say I didn’t care for antiques until I became one.
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Q My brother and I are hoping you can shed some light on this.
Our 89-year-old mother lives in an assisted living facility in Dane County. Although it is expensive, I think she is getting good care and this is the best option for her.
She has been there for the last six months and has made some friends, but mostly it is the care we were looking for, as there are no options for her to live with either of my two brothers or me and she can not live independently.
The issue is my older brother, who is her Power of Attorney for Health Care. He frequently asks the staff to do things for mom that she can do on her own. He feels she is paying for care and that means the staff should do everything for her. I think mom needs to continue to do things for herself that she can do — that this will give her some purpose. But, as the Power of Attorney, does he “hold the power” over everything related to mom’s care? (from a son in Portage)
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One of the most common observations made by opponents of religion is that we don’t need God in order to have a coherent and integral morality.
Atheists and agnostics are extremely sensitive to the charge that the rejection of God will conduce automatically to moral chaos. Consequently, they argue that a robust sense of ethics can be grounded in the consensus of the human community over time or in the intuitions and sensibilities of decent people, etc.
What I would like to do is lay out, in very brief compass, the Catholic understanding of the relationship between morality and the existence of God and to show, thereby, why it is indispensably important for a society that wishes to maintain its moral integrity to maintain, at the same time, a vibrant belief in God. |
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We turn on our faucets and out comes water — clean, refreshing, plentiful, life-sustaining water. But we rarely give it a thought.
We just tend to take for granted that it will always be there. We even forget to thank God — the well-spring of life.
But for 768 million fellow human beings, clean plentiful water is a distant dream, according to the United Nations. For them, the water they drink, cook with, and bath in, is polluted and often disease-ridden, and must be carried long distances in many cases.
According to figures released by the United Nations Children‘s Fund in 2013, lack of access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene is a leading cause of death from diarrhea in children under five, amounting to approximately 1,400 children dying each day.“Forty days in the desert” describes Jesus at the start of his ministry and the Christian community during Lent.
For me, henceforth, it will also bring to mind migrants who make a dangerous journey through Mexico to the United States. I learned on a tour with the organization Witness for Peace that the trip for those who start in southern Mexico or Central America can take one to two months and often includes walking through treacherous stretches of desert.
