Category: Catholic Church

When We Need A Miracle…

     …God, who always knows what we need, will provide one:      The small rural Missouri town of Gower has become an unexpected pilgrimage destination after a nun’s exhumed body showed no visible signs of decomposition — four years after her burial.      Hundreds of people have been flocking to the town 40 miles north …

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Human Institutions

     They’re imperfect – all of them. Every now and then, a reminder is useful.      The Acts of the Apostles contains a pair of segments that make many things plain – indeed, plainer in some ways than the Church would like us to know. The first of them is in Chapter 2:      And …

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A Brief Announcement

     Someone who gave the name of “Mike Bizzaro,” along with a strange-looking email address, just wrote to inform me that “[my] soul has been removed from Christianity.” He also provided a link to one of the ugliest web pages I’ve had the dubious pleasure of visiting. It is extremely important that anyone who agrees …

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Wrong Turnings

     Please don’t misinterpret what follows. I love my Church, despite my handful of disagreements with it. But now and then some of its notables go off the rails so dramatically that I’m compelled to take exception to it.      The United States has a shortage of Catholic priests. Parishes from coast to coast find …

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Personnel Policies

     I’ve known a lot of people who were and are smarter than average. That comes from working in occupations that require that characteristic. Bluntly, if your duties will necessarily require careful thinking, distinguishing among things and ideas according to their inherent properties, you must be able to do so. Why else would your employer …

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An Attitudinal Imperative

     And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. …

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The Deserving Poor

     American Catholics tend to vote. (Yes, we have other bad habits as well.) Unfortunately, too many vote for Democrats. Why? The tragically misunderstood “social teaching” of the Church.      It’s widely believed among Catholics that we have a moral obligation to provide for “the poor.” Note the lack of qualification. Part of the reason …

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This Is Mind-Boggling

     How are American Catholics under attack? Let me count the ways:      The FBI’s Richmond Division would like to protect Virginians from the threat of “white supremacy,” which it believes has found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. An intelligence analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released in …

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Had Enough Yet?

     I have:      Josh Alexander, 16, is not allowed to attend school for the rest of the year after saying he would continue to express his belief that God created only two genders. The school told him his presence would be “detrimental to the physical and mental well-being” of transgender students, Alexander told The …

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An Epiphany Story

     I’m fairly sure all my Gentle Readers know the story of the Magi and their gifts to the Christ Child. Today – the first Sunday after New Year’s Day – is the day when Catholics celebrate the Epiphany, which includes that momentous visit to the Holy Family from three of the most learned men …

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Appreciation And Gratitude

     It has been written, and truly, that among the things that make happiness possible, the greatest of all is gratitude. I’ve written about that several times here at Liberty’s Torch. But a free-floating, generalized state of gratitude is a difficult thing to create and sustain within oneself. It’s a lot easier to be grateful …

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Perspectives

One of my favorite Catholic writers is the late Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen:      Venerable Fulton John Sheen (born Peter John Sheen, May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. His cause for …

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Imagination, Orthodoxy, And Faith

     Hm. Perhaps that should be “And The Faith,” but let it stand as it is.      Yesterday at The Catholic Thing, there appeared an essay, with embedded interview, on Fostering the Catholic Imagination. Let there be no argument: the subject is an important one. There isn’t enough fiction written from a Catholic perspective, which …

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Mysteries, Not Complexities

     Just yesterday, I encountered this touching essay at The Catholic Thing. It starts with the mention of a recent wedding. However, its true import is expressed in this segment:      I’d converted to Catholicism from atheism in my mid-20s (I’m 39 now). This wasn’t news to anyone, but few expected the faith to take …

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The War On The Church

     You might not believe it – after all, the mainstream media never report on atrocities committed against Catholic churches in America – but it’s going on nevertheless.      You see, the oh-so-tolerant Left considers us intolerable:      THERE WAS NO winner in last month’s vote on abortion rights in Kansas. Technically, nothing changed after …

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An Institution, Its Functions, And Its Organization

     I have said at other times that a church is necessarily a conservative institution. Its first duty is to conserve its theological core, for from that, all its other doctrines and pronouncements must flow. A church that discards or casually alters its core, or permits it to be altered or ignored by those who …

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The Church Under Attack

     Political matters can go hang for the moment. Just now, my focus is on more permanent things…some of them eternal. ***      Surely this piece is not so far in the past that my Gentle Readers will have forgotten it. It may have drawn more giggles than sober ponderings, but the true import of …

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“Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition” — ?

     If you seek to destroy a community united around a set of ideas, but you can’t effectively refute the ideas or persuade the allegiants to abandon them, the most promising alternative is to attack the community’s icons and its symbols.      We’ve already seen quite a lot of this, these past few decades. Note …

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For Corpus Christi 2022

     The Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ, is a supremely important one throughout Latin America, and in parts of Europe and Africa as well. I wrote an essay about its significance some years ago. The feast strikes me as particularly significant today, owing to the steadily tightening food shortages here: …

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Since No One Else Is Doing So…

     …it falls to me to commemorate the 105th Anniversary of the Apparition of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima:      Our Lady of Fátima is a Roman Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary based on the famed Marian apparitions reported in 1917 by three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria, in Fátima, Portugal. …

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