Free Republic

North Carolina was the last state to end its eugenics program, which sterilized about 7,600 residents deemed unfit to have children, but it could be first state to compensate victims, an author said Thursday night. "North Carolina will go into history as the last to quit, but the first to compensate," Edwin Black told more than 280 people during a lecture at Winston-Salem State University. "You can take a giant step in which every man will be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his chromosomes." Black is the author of a best-selling book, "War...

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was made nothing that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. ... That was the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not. He came...

The meaning and the value of certain words quite frequently change from one era to another and from one place to another. For this reason, in my recent article The Demythologization of the Superior which appeared in this newspaper on December 5th, I said that the word "demythologization" could have various meanings and that when one speaks of it one must specify the meaning which is intended. This I did very clearly, or at least it seemed so to me, in the above mentioned article. With such words, however, one must be careful to protect oneself from the danger and...

True Soldiers in the Church Militant King St. Louis IX of France led the seventh and eighth crusades. He enforced strict military regulations against killing noncombatants and prisoners, holding the conversion and baptism of infidels among the highest of priorities. As a child, his mother would often say to him: "I love you my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child; but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should commit a mortal sin." Spiritual warfare in modern times The body of faithful which comprises the Catholic Church is divided into...

In the early part of the 20th century an author named Nesta Webster penned a provocative work called The Cause of World Unrest. In it she posited, as she did in other books (including her much reprinted study of the French Revolution) that all human events were shaped by a small but malevolent conspiracy. Interestingly, Catholic historian and apologist Hilaire Belloc expressed impatience with such conspiracy-fixations in a letter to an American friend in 1924: The Cause of World Unrest is a book written by a woman called Webster. In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one...

Is man fundamentally a moral and religious being, as Pope Leo XIII insists in Rerum Novarum? Or, is man a being fundamentally driven by a desire for material gain, as is asserted by Thomas Hobbes and James Madison? This article argues that Leo’s view of humanity is the more accurate one, and that implies problems for the underlying ideas of the American regime. Rather than seeing religion as too weak to restrain man’s desire for gain, as does Madison (and the American Republic), Leo understood that religion can be a powerful force for drawing society to a high level of...

A Letter from Our Cathedral Rector by Very Rev. Fr. John Lankeit, Rector, Ss. Simon & Jude Cathedral Phoenix, AZ January 30, 2011Dear Parishioners,I want to thank all of you who have recently started receiving Holy Communion on the tongue, not to mention those of you who already had been. This subject has generated a lot of buzz over the past few weeks, the vast majority of which has been overwhelmingly positive.While my main objective in encouraging reception on the tongue is to deepen appreciation for the Eucharist, I also have a pastoral responsibility to eliminate abuses common to receiving...

There are three ways of attention and prayer, by which the soul can be lifted and become spiritually exhaulted, or crumble and perish. If these three ways are used appropriately and at the right time, the soul will be lifted, whilst if they are used unreasonably and at the wrong time, the soul will perish. Attention therefore should be tied and inseparable to prayer, in the way that the body is tied and inseparable to the soul. Attention should have the lead and mind for enemies as a guard, and fight sin, and resist evil thoughts of the soul. It...

"God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, Prologue "It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us...

"And what of the opportunity to retire to the society of the best men, and to select some model by which we may direct our own lives? But we can do this only in leisure." — Seneca, On Leisure It may seem that the quest for leisure has become a fetish for us moderns, and the less said of it the better. But Joseph Pieper quickly opens our eyes with the suggestion that our culture does not suffer from the overabundance of leisure but, rather, its scarcity. He would remind us of Aristotle's rather startling assertion that "the first principle...

As the last of the formerly Catholic governments of Europe are shedding every vestige of their distinctively Catholic character as rapidly as possible, it seems well worth looking again at the Catholic Church's teaching on the relationship of the Church to the State. Like just about all Americans, I imbibed the twin secular dogmas of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State with my mother's milk. And when I converted to Catholicism over ten years ago, my conversion seemed to pose no great challenges to either. Given the prevailing understanding of the Second Vatican Council, said to be...

There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the “Welfare State.” The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism—an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many...

At the center of Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity is the idea that Christianity involves an attack upon the human will. In The Antichrist he says the following: "The Christian conception of God…is one of the most corrupt conceptions of the divine ever attained on earth. It may even represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine types.… God as the declaration of war against life, against nature, against the will to live! … God–the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy!"1In this passage, and in much of his work, Nietzsche is reacting against a version of...

There are many titles by which we address Our Lady, in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin. In the most recent of these titles, we say, “Mother of the Church, pray for us.” What are we asking for when we make this invocation? We are asking Our Lady to obtain for us all the graces we need to live up to what we profess when we say, “We believe in the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.” The first of these graces for which we pray, and the most fundamental is unity. It is also the one grace that on...

When a person rises from bodily knowledge to the soul’s knowledge and from that to spiritual knowledge, then he sees God and possesses knowledge of God, which is his salvation. Knowledge of God, as will be explained further on, is not intellectual, but existential. That is, one’s whole being is filled with this knowledge of God. But in order to attain it, one’s heart must have been purified, that is, the soul, nous (intellect) and heart must have been healed. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt.5,8).Let us look at things more analytically.As I have...

To the term ‘wonder’, the term ‘inebriation’ (rawwayuta) is semantically close: it is used by Isaac to describe an especially strong experience of the love of God, joy and spiritual elevation in a state of mystical ecstasy. The theme of ‘sober inebriation’ is a central one in the whole of the Christian mystical tradition, from Origen and Gregory of Nyssa onwards.[1] In the Syriac tradition, this theme is outlined as early as in Ephrem and John of Apamea; among the writers of the seventh century, it was developed by Dadisho and Symeon d’Taibutheh.[2] For Isaac the Syrian, the theme of...

This Good Friday reading is an excerpt from The Catecheses (Cat. 3, 13-19; SC 50, 174-177) by St. John Chrysostom, one of the greatest Early Church Fathers of the 5th Century. It is used in the Roman Catholic Church's Office of Readings for Good Friday with the accompanying biblical reading from Hebrews 9: 11-28 and is a powerful meditation on the passion. But it also tells us much about the connection between the passion and the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist which flow from the paschal mystery and connect us to its saving power. Note the evidence for a...

WORCESTER – Audrey Santo’s beatification process could officially begin next year, supporters rejoiced Sunday. They highlighted the Eucharist and redemptive suffering at a memorial for the fourth anniversary of Audrey’s death, held at Immaculate Conception Church and the Father Connors Center. Five years after someone’s death, a diocesan commission for that person’s canonization cause can be impaneled, said Father Kenneth Yossa, a Byzantine priest from Pennsylvania who gave a talk about exorcisms. He said he’s a consultant for The Foundation for the Promotion of the Cause of Beatification and Canonization of Little Audrey Santo and for the Diffusion of the...

Big Sister is Watching You BY Whittaker Chambers Miss Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead. Despite a generally poor press, it is said to have sold some four hundred thousand copies. Thus, it became a wonder of the book trade of a kind that publishers dream about after taxes. So Atlas Shrugged had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously, and that apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: "Excruciatingly awful." I find it a remarkably silly book....

The idea of God as love is central and dominant in Isaac’s thought: it is the main source of his theological opinions, ascetical recommendations and mystical insights. Divine love is beyond human understanding and above all description in words. At the same time it is reflected in God’s actions with respect to the created world and humankind: ‘Among all His actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and the end of His dealings with us’.[2] Both the creation of the world and God’s coming on earth in flesh...