Free Republic

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, explains why she boycotted today’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on “Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?” “I have decided to boycott the sham hearing orchestrated today by the Republican members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to trample on the civil liberties of millions of American women who deserve coverage of their legitimate and most basic healthcare needs, including contraception. “The Republican majority refused to allow the testimony of witnesses who represent millions of Catholics, such as...

A defining moment in Mitt Romney's post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions. Romney announced this decision -- saying it was the "right thing for hospitals" to do -- just two days after he had taken the opposite position. The story begins in 1975, when Massachusetts enacted a law that said, "No privately controlled hospital .. shall be required to permit any patient to have an abortion ... or...

In the sedate and sober world of bankruptcy law, one lawyer's memorandum sticks out like a sore loser. "Across the country the court systems and particularly the Bankruptcy Court in Minnesota, are composed of a bunch of ignoramus, bigoted Catholic beasts that carry the sword of the church," the Nov. 25 filing said. It went on to call one bankruptcy judge "a Catholic Knight Witch Hunter," said one trustee was "a priest's boy" and claimed another trustee is a "Jesuitess." It got worse from there. Hastings lawyer Rebekah Nett also called U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Nancy Dreher and other court personnel...

A majority of Catholics voted for Barack Obama. And for it, we got a nice photo op at the University of Notre Dame and some ameliorating verbiage. But since then, we’ve seen a long list of actions that’s caused obvious displeasure among many Catholics, including priests and bishops. And it has some asking if the Obama administration anti-Catholic? For answers, let’s look at some recent actions by the administration. Recently, The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) filed a Freedom of Information Act request to discover why the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declined to renew a...

The Vaticans Message Was Grossly Distorted by Reuters October 24, 2011 The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace issued a document today titled, "Toward Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of Global Public Authority." Commenting on it is Catholic League president Bill Donohue: There has been much hyperventilation from some quarters over the release of this document. All of it is unwarranted. To begin with, the text is not an encyclical, nor is it the work of Pope Benedict XVI. Much of what it says is consistent with long-standing Catholic social teaching: the quest for the...

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 6, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - While surveying the landscape for inroads to push the homosexual agenda into Poland, American embassy officials under the Obama administration complained that the Catholic Church teaching is a major source of “homophobia” in the heavily Catholic country, according to private cables recently published by Wikileaks. The cables from the American embassy in Warsaw, marked “sensitive but unclassified,” were part of a dump of over 250,000 official government documents last week by Wikileaks. One cable from the American embassy in Warsaw dated August 2009 pointed to the Catholic Church as central in promoting “homophobia”...

Anti-Catholicism, Hypocrisy and Double Standards Sunday, July 22, 2007 As a young Catholic I was unaware of the amount of irrational hatred that was directed toward the Catholic Church and Catholics themselves. Growing up in Los Angeles I was not subject to the Fundamentalist “tracts” being placed on my family car while we were at Mass as I would have been had I lived in the “Bible Belt”. My exposure to people of other faiths was frequent and always positive. The majority of my friends growing were Jewish as were the girls whom I had the honor of dating. My...

The passage of a same-sex marriage bill in New York, over the objections of the Catholic hierarchy, has led to a storm of criticism of the state's bishops. The most extreme condemnation comes from a July 5 editorial in the National Catholic Reporter (NCR).   The Catholic hierarchy, says NCR, "has lost most of its credibility with the wider culture on matters of sexuality and personal morality, just as it has lost its authority within the Catholic community on the same issues." The bishops are guilty of engaging in everything from "wholesale excommunications" to "open warfare" with dissidents.   The...

It's no wonder why anti-Masonic conspiracy theories fail to catch on: There is a long line of heroic, patriotic, Christian Freemasons in our national history. To assert that George Washington, Winston Churchill, Stephen Austin, Buzz Aldrin or Omar Bradley were part of a some Satanic conspiracy is to beggar credibility. At the same time, many evil organizations, from the K.K.K. to Aleister Crowley's pagan cult, borrowed heavily from freemasonry, employing its systems of graduated revelations, initiations, and secret recognitions to infiltrate and pervert other organizations. These organizations can fairly be said to be perversions and usurpers of freemasonry, not freemasonry...

Comparing Christianity and the New Paganism The most serious challenge for Christianity today isn't one of the other great religions of the world, such as Islam or Buddhism. Nor is it simple atheism, which has no depth, no mass appeal, no staying power. Rather, it's a religion most of us think is dead. That religion is paganism — and it is very much alive. Paganism is simply the natural gravity of the human spirit, the line of least resistance, religion in its fallen state. The "old" paganism came from the country. Indeed, the very word "paganism" comes from the Latin...

Hugo Chavez: Anti-Catholic, Narcissist, Leninist By George J. Marlin When Hugo Chavez was sworn in as president of Venezuela in February 1997, he was hailed as the true successor to Latin American freedom fighter, Simon Bolivar. Notables including Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky shouted from rooftops that Chavez was a visionary who would restore prosperity and return power to the people. And they applauded his claim that the United States is “the most evil regime that has ever existed.” These useful idiots have turned a blind eye to the fact that Chavez is a depraved Marxist...

Today is April 1, 2011, and therefore April Fool's Day. The question is can Catholics legitimately participate in it without sinning? This is a question which deserves to be addressed because most Catholics do participate, but we must always follow our moral compass, no matter the time of year. The main moral issues brought up in April Fools include lying, and causing harm to others. "Harm" of course can be accomplished in a multitude of ways, and therefore most sins could come under this categorization. First, let's address lying. Often, April Fools jokes involve convincing someone that something which is...

Many people profess that Jesus Christ is their savior - but always with a caveat (always with some ADDITIONAL factor - WHICH ALWAYS ADDS UP TO WORKS). Many people today profess that Jesus Christ is their savior; but - if they are laboring under the delusion that they must DO something (some sort of WORKS) in order to KEEP their salvation they are TAKING AWAY from the FINISHED WORK of the Lord Jesus Christ on Calvary and ADDING to the Gospel of the Grace of God! When the Lord Jesus Christ spoke the words It Is FINISHED [John 19:30] -...

Virgin Mary Apparitions Near Green Bay Shrine Recognized as First in U.S. Green Bay, WI (Green Bay Press Gazette) – A shrine in the town of Green Bay is one of only a handful in the world — and the sole location in the United States — officially designated as a place where the Virgin Mary appeared. David Ricken, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, announced today his official approval of the Marian apparitions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion.

This paper is written in two parts. The first explains and documents the Roman Catholic Church's position on justification. The second part presents the true gospel in contrast to the Catholic Church's position. If you want to go straight to the gospel presentation for Catholics, simply scroll down the page. Because of the great emphasis on Sacred Tradition within the Catholic Church and because so many Roman Catholics appeal to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, the Word of God is often placed after the Catholic Church itself in relation to authority. Because of this, many Catholics appeal to...

A New York couple have been charged with defrauding a wealthy musician to the tune of $20 million (£12.3 million) after he innocently visited their computer servicing company to have a virus removed from his laptop. The hard-to-believe story started started in 2004 when moneyed pianist Roger Davidson asked Mount Kisco computer store owners Vickram Bedi, 36, and his Icelandic girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir, 39, to rid his computer of a virus. On learning of Davidson's wealth, the pair are alleged to have concocted an elaborate social engineering scam that defrauded him of somewhere between the $6 million the police have...

Archbishop Timothy Dolan has come out swinging against The New York Times, accusing it of anti-Catholic bias in two recent articles. He is right. Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice it seems to me in America. If the same comments that were made about Catholic religious figures were aimed at Rabbis, immams or Dali Lamas there would be widespread outrage. You will not find such comments. Artists have been assassinated by crazed Muslims over depictions of the Prophet Muhammad after all. The two articles concerned were a review of an art exhibit which portrayed former beloved John Cardinal O'Connor as...

The Archdiocese of Detroit is warning Catholics in metro Detroit ... to stay away from a national conference of liberal Catholics to be held in Detroit next year. And Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron is calling upon organizers of the conference to cancel their plans, saying they are in opposition to the Catholic faith. The American Catholic Council, which calls for church reforms and greater openness, is set to hold a national gathering in June 2011 featuring progressive Catholic leaders near the 35th anniversary of the ‘Call to Action,’ a Detroit gathering in 1976 that urged reform and was held...

Where to find the "blunder-prone spiritual leader of rigid intellect and uncommunicative soul"? Why, in today's New York Times! Where a remarkable hit piece by someone named Roger Cohen appeared today. His commentary on Pope Benedict's visit to Great Britain brings back a nostalgic feeling, the kind history buffs would associate with the great Know-Nothing Party of the 19th century. Of the visit in general, Mr. Cohen disapproves. " Seldom has a long-delayed journey been so ill-timed." And, to be sure, he is not alone, for thankfully, "Benedict has not been received with open arms." And why not? ..." Today,...

Police have arrested five suspected Islamist terrorists, working as street cleaners in London, over an alleged plan assassinate the Pope. The men were arrested during raids at 5.45am at a rubbish depot in central London based on an intelligence tip off received overnight. The suspects, aged 26, 27, 36, 40 and 50 were arrested by officers from Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism. They are said to be from a variety of nationalities including a number of Algerian origin. The depot where they worked is less than a mile...

A prophet, who now goes by the name “Rael,” once encountered space aliens who told him the secret of life. Later, his followers, “the Raelians,” set up an advocacy group to expose pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church. But the group’s work was frustrated when Pope Benedict XVI (a.k.a. Joe Ratzinger) covered up the crimes of Catholic priests, in an effort to discredit the Raelians and suppress their message.

(CNN) -- As the blue Chevy Cobalt crept toward the edge of the property in Chula, Georgia, a palpable nervousness wafted through the cramped car. Three men, straight out of central casting from "Deliverance," craned their necks toward our vehicle. A 30-by-50-foot Confederate flag waved 120 feet in the air. Nothing says "Welcome to the South" quite like the old battle flag. We were quite the sight for this rural stop along Interstate 75: two olive-skinned Americans on a mission; an African-American photographer; and me, a white boy from the Bible Belt. (snip) Already, the road trip has been a...

... Why? Because they refused to compromise with the new Caesar - an intolerant secularist governmental agency which insists that they deny their deeply held convictions. Those convictions are rooted in the Natural Law and based upon a concern for the best interest of children. And, yes, they are informed by their Catholic Faith. Is that a crime? It may soon become one! They want to continue their charitable work for the true common good but they are being denied that opportunity. Why? They refused to offer the sacrifice to the emperor... They were the last Catholic Adoption Agency left...

A WANNABE warlock has revealed plans to open OCCULT centres in Birmingham and Coventry during the Pope’s visit.Former parliamentary candidate Magnus Lynius Shadee also wants to pray at Cardinal Newman’s grave in a move that is sure to infuriate the Vatican.The occultist says the centres are at a secret location near Cofton Park in Birmingham and another venue in Coventry.Shadee, 65, said: “I’ve always intended to open an occult centre in the cities and the Pope’s visit simply brought forward the date. The Vatican will probably be none too happy with the idea though.‘‘I will also visit Cardinal Newman’s grave...

Anti-Catholicism is on the rise and despite its frequency many Catholics often seem surprised to hear it. CMR is here to help by offering you the top ten clues that you're about to hear something anti-Catholic. We break it down by percentage. This is math folks. We've carried the ones and everything. (No, we're not going to show our work. Just trust us.) Broken down by percentage points here are the chances you're about to hear something anti-Catholic if you hear: 44% chance if someone says "I'm not religious but I'm very spiritual." 49% chance if someone says, "The Pope...

The half-dozen contestants, 20-something aspiring artists all, enter the famous Phillips de Pury art auction house. Mr. de Pury himself ushers them into the special room where they are presented with a collection of paintings by Andres Serrano, the man who came to fame in 1989 with the ghastly painting, sponsored by the National Endowment of the Arts, depicting a crucifix dunked in a jar of urine. They are hugely impressed. The final painting they are shown is just that -- the original "Piss Christ." They are in awe, quietly expressing their amazement at the talent. And then the door...

That is the shocking allegation by Alexandra Colen, an orthodox Belgian Catholic, who details her long fight with Cardinal Danneels and the Belgian Catholic hierarchy (including the pedophile recently retired bishop Vangheluwe) over a pedophilic sex-ed book approved for Belgium's Catholic schools. Excerpt: His predecessor, the liberal Cardinal Danneels, who was very popular with the press in Belgium and abroad, was Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and Primate of Belgium from 1979 until 2010. The sympathy for pedophile attitudes and arguments among the Belgian bishops during this period was no secret, especially since 1997 when the fierce controversy about the catechism textbook...

What are we to think of Calvin? Rev . Fr. Philippe Marcille The influence of John Calvin (1509-1564) has been immense, perhaps even more so than that of Luther. Certainly, without the bellowing revolutionary Luther, Calvin would not have been able to do anything; yet without Calvin, the revolt would not have had the political impact that it did in France and especially the United States. Origins He was born in Picardy, France, in 1509. His parents were well-to-do people. A very gifted student, he received a benefice from the Church and continued his studies at Paris. He was not...

I don’t know whether this is mainly for your Last Acceptable Prejudice file or your Throwing a Nutty file … from CNA.  My emphases and comments: Catholics denounce slated ‘documentary’ on Pope by homosexual activist London, England, Jun 8, 2010 / 01:07 am (CNA).- A homosexual activist [deviant, and therefore in liberal eyes well-qualified…] and Vatican protestor in the U.K. is slated to make what he calls a “factual� documentary on the Holy Father, [It will be truly unbiased, I bet.] which is set to air just before the upcoming papal trip. One critic of the proposed film called it...

A UK TV station's commissioning of Peter Tatchell - a gay rights campaigner and critic of the Vatican - to make a documentary about the Pope which will air around the time of the pontiff's UK visit is drawing criticism. Mr Tatchell is one of the founders of a group called Protest the Pope that criticises the Pope's record on homosexuality, contraception and child abuse and says that he "is an unsuitable guest of the UK government", said a report on Telegraph.co.uk. British broadcaster Channel 4 said the 60-minute program will examine the impact that the Pope's pronouncements have had...

Istanbul - A top Catholic Church official in Turkey was stabbed to death in his home on Thursday, Turkish television broadcasters reported. The reports said Vicar Apostolic for the Anatolia region, Bishop Luigi Padovese, was killed by a driver in the bishop's home in Iskenderun. Further details were not immediately known. In recent years, nationalist extremists in Turkey on several occasions have attacked or kidnapped Christian clergymen in the country. Luigi Padovese took up his post in Iskenderun in southern Turkey in November 2004.

In this excerpt from John Gerstner's Primitive Theology, Dr. Gerstner carefully sketches the basic differences between Evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism, focusing on the differing views on justification. Over the coming days we will highlight this unique resource. ***** Several years ago, a Presbyterian-turned-Romanist wrote a book detailing his journey to “Rome Sweet Home.” I maintain, “Rome is Not Home.” Let me explain. Rome affirms the Bible and its account of the creation of Adam and Eve, their temptation, and the fall of mankind by the disobedience of Adam. So Rome agrees with most Protestants that this is a fallen world...

So the other day one of my readers declared: Copernicus was so afraid of the catholic church that he waited until he was on his death bed to proclaim that the earth as was believed by the catholic church was not the center of the universe and that it was the sun. The best answer to these sorts of claims is “Documentation please?�  An even better answer, if you have the time and inclination, is to provide the answer yourself, which I helpfully did since I had the time and inclination.  If you want it yourself, go here. My reader,...

Sometimes referred to as “The Mouth of the South,” the CNN founder lashed out against religious believers in the past. He once dubbed Christianity a “religion for losers” and wondered aloud whether the Ash Wednesday observers around him at work were “Jesus freaks.” His marriage to Jane Fonda was rumored to become strained when she started finding religion. And while his stance has certainly mellowed with the years - he apologized for his past comments and joined with churches in 2008 to fight malaria - his suggestion that God may have had a hand in the oil disaster that killed...

“I’m not a real religious person, but I’m somewhat religious. And I’m just wondering if God is telling us he doesn’t want us to drill offshore,” he said. “And right before that we had that coal mine disaster in West Virginia where we lost 29 miners,” as well as repeated mining disasters – “seems like there’s one over there every week” – in China. “Maybe the Lord’s tired of having the mountains of West Virginia, the tops knocked off of them so they can get more coal. I think maybe we ought to just leave the coal in the ground...

....Margaret Carlson appears to be following Rahm Emanuel's advice to "never let a good crisis go to waste". She used this crisis to attack her own Church. She also set the stage for Joe Scarborough, her Protestant enabler, to again display his ignorance of the Catholic Church. ... I have used this expression "anti-Catholic Catholics" in the past in reference to those Catholics in public life who take positions at odds with the teaching of the Church and the Natural Law. The most obvious example is those who reject the fundamental Right to Life and endorse the killing of our...

The media has been fanning the flames of anti-Catholicism this month and now a columnist for the state owned ABC in Australia is comparing the Pope to Osama bin Laden and asking, “Why not bomb the Vatican, and riddle the Pope with bullets as he staggers out of the flames?” Columnist Bob Ellis, in what has to be the most alarmingly ignorant and offensively anti-Catholic piece in the mainstream media, compares Pope Benedict to Osama Bin Laden...

MARKTL-AM-INN, Germany, April 13 (UPI) -- Pope Benedict XVI's childhood home in Germany was vandalized Tuesday with graffiti that was quickly painted over, police said. Police in the southern German town of Marktl-am-Inn didn't release the exact words of the graffiti but said it referred to the current sex-abuse scandal plaguing the Roman Catholic Church, The Washington Times reported. "The wall over the entrance door of the Pope birth house had insulting contents written in blue," said a Bavarian police report, which the Times translated with the help of a computer program. "The writer obviously used a lacquer spray can...

To best gauge the scale of the global media’s defamation of Pope Benedict XVI, look at the cartoons in the major newspapers from Thailand to Brazil, Mexico, the United States, and everywhere in Europe. Such slander, malicious innuendo, and vilification against any other major figure of the global stage would be impossible to imagine.Clearly, for Holy Week, all the stops have been pulled out in the media campaign against the Holy Father.Major newspapers, led by theTimesof London and The New York Times,are publishing fiction as fact in their attempt to discredit Benedict and make him complicit in failing to prevent...

Roseanne: "The pedo priests are trying to cover up the number of LITTLE GIRLS they have molested too, as if that doesn't matter as much as what happens to boys. Trust me, the number of girls raped and molested by priests is at least double the boys. They are trying to cover it all up so that they can end up purging gay priests, and laying the blame on them. The fact is pedos like to rape both boys and girls, and only a small number of pedos are exclusively into male children. I am starting to think that any...

On her April 5 satellite radio show, Rosie O'Donnell took her anti-Catholicism to a new level by likening the Catholic Church to the Jonestown cult. As Brian Maloney of The Radio Equalizer put it, "in Rosie's twisted world, there's really no distinction to be made between the Pope and Jim Jones, murderous cult leader responsible for the deaths of more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle." O'Donnell certainly has a past of Catholic/Christian bashing. On the April 19, 2007 edition of ABC's The View, she expressed her concern that having five Catholic Supreme Court justice somehow violated the separation...

NPR has an unintentionally hilarious piece out today that sounds the alarm that when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens steps down it could be the first time ever that there are no Protestants on the Court? Why? Because all those darn Catholics!!! AND THEY FEAR THERE MIGHT BE MORE COMING!!!! But don't worry they quickly add that it's not like there's anything wrong with that. What?! They're just sayin.' NPR writes: With U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens talking openly about retirement, attention has focused on the "who" — as in who is on President Obama's short list...

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin. Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.(snip)Or maybe 30-second spots defending the pope with Benedict’s voice intoning at the end: “I am infallible, and I approve this message.”

Jeanine Pirro provided a textbook demonstration of media bias against the Catholic Church during her stint as a substitute host for CNN Headline News's "The Joy Behar Show on March 29. Pirro never gave her guest a chance to defend the church and interrupted him six times within 1 minute, 59 seconds. Pirro is a former Westchester County, N.Y., district attorney and judge who now hosts the TV program, "Judge Jeanine Pirro." She also appears on network and cable news programs as a legal analyst. First, she stacked the deck. Pirro hosted a panel discussion about the recent allegations that...

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in...

ABC News is just now discovering last week's confusion over Christoph Cardinal Schonborn's comments on priestly celibacy. If you missed it, the cardinal had written a column for his diocesan magazine addressing the past sex abuse scandal. In the article, Cardinal Schönborn called for an "unflinching examination" of possible reasons for pedophilia, and said that this includes the issues of training priests "as well as the question of what happened in the so-called sexual revolution.�"It also includes the issue of priest celibacy and the issue of personality development. It requires a great deal of honesty, both on the part of...

ROME, MARCH 8, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Priestly celibacy is not psychologically dangerous, and in fact, sexual behavior based on "anything goes" is what is truly destructive to the personality. This is the affirmation made by Dr. Aquilino Polaino Lorente, a physician and psychiatrist who teaches courses on psychopathology at the University of St. Paul in Madrid. The psychiatrist -- best known for his work in children's and family psychology -- was a speaker at the two-day conference held last week at Rome's Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. The conference, "Priestly Celibacy: Theology and Life," was sponsored by the Congregation for...

The Dutch priest who refused Communion on February 13th to his town's openly homosexual Carnival “prince” is now facing police complaints from homosexual activists.The complaints follow a protest by homosexualists at the Catholic parish in Reusel on Sunday, which was held in response to the decision of the pastor, Fr. Luc Buyens, to withhold Communion from Gijs Vermeulen, 24, at the town's traditional Carnival Mass.Fr. Buyens had alerted Vermeulen in advance, stating that he must refuse him Communion because the young man had made a public display of his active homosexuality leading up to the town's Carnival festivities.Anticipating the protest,...

Back in one my old philosophy classes I recall lengthy discussions as to the relationship between names and reality, and then spinning around for hours contemplating the brain teaser of what it means to "mean" something about anything. The aftermath: an entire class of young minds slipped further into skepticism, as if the reality each twenty something experienced was completely unknowable. Of course, arriving at the conclusion that ultimate reality is unknowable is... to know something about ultimate reality! Ah, the futility of the sinful mind in its continual construction of Babel towers. Without the presupposition "He is there and...