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Brothers and Sisters: Peace be with you. Frequently, Internet atheistic aces challenge me to provide evidence and/or proof for the existence of God. Almost all the time the proof they demand is, on its face, absurd because it is empirical in way or the other and God, if they only knew what the word "God" is, lies beyond any empirical proof. No matter, they keep insisting and the silence of the impossible experiment is proof enough for them. This post is not address to those narrow, sterile minds because they've closed themselves within and become impermeable to any argument....

Brethren, Peace be with you. Back in 2011 I wrote Do We Need to Use a Different Word for Marriage in the Church? and, Should Catholic Clergy Cease Signing Civil “Marriage” Licenses? I say Aye!, in which I supported the idea of getting the Church out of the business of issuing marriage licenses, an idea originally put forward by Monsignor Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC. Today, Father (Protopresbyter) John Whiteford, an Orthodox priest from Houston, TX formulated on his blog a slightly different proposal which has the state, not the churches, get out of the business of licensing...

Teacher Patricia Jannuzi Brethren, Peace be with you. As you may know from numerous media reports, Patricia Jannuzzi is a (suspended) teacher at a Catholic high school in New Jersey. According to Aleteia.org, Jannuzzi, a teacher at Immaculata High School in Somerville, was suspended with pay and benefits two weeks ago. Her bishop, Paul Bootkoski of the diocese of Metuchen, wrote that Jannuzzi’s now-deleted Facebook post was “disturbing and do not reflect the church’s teachings of acceptance.” Placing private-school teachers on administrative leave is a common form of punishment that school district officials use to fire the employees, according...

Brethren, Peace be with you. According to numerous news sources, the Presbyterian Church in the USA has changed its constitution and now will allow, celebrate, and bless same-sex "marriages." Of course, this is wrong and unwarranted in Scripture, but the fact of the matter is that Mainline Protestant church bodies don't care one way or the other about Scripture unless examined through the distorted genderist, Postmodern lenses dominating discourse in their seminaries. Out of curiosity, I checked the Presbyterian Church's own membership statistics to see what's up, and I came with the chart below. If the trend holds, in...

Brethren, Peace be with you. Ironically - or perhaps Providentially - I wrote my best academic paper ever during my years as an Eastern Orthodox Christian. You can still see that a very Scholastic mind stood behind the paper, perhaps a portent of my later return to the Catholic Church. The paper is titled Holy Tradition vs. Sola Scriptura: The Witness of the Liturgy. Frank Schaeffer published it on his Christian Activist Number 10 back in the 1990s. Fortunately, the good people at PEMPTOUSIA saved the paper from Schaeffer's unfortunate shipwreck and preserved the paper at their website. I hope...

News Analysis Brethren, Peace be with you. I was listening with great interest to this news item at NPR, titled In 'Red Notice,' Success Draws Treachery, Tragedy In Putin's Russia. It is an interview of William Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a company he started in Russia in 1996. That, he says, drew the attention and machinations of a corrupt group of Russian officials. It's also about Browder's new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, in which he tells the story of how it happened. Brothers and sisters, I...

  Brethren: Peace be with you! As I approach my half century of life I began thinking about the lifespan for an American male like me. I've begun to reflect in all seriousness about my mortality. The Bible tells us that the typical lifespan for a man is 70 years, or 80 for "those who are strong" (Psalm 90:10). Contemporary scientific estimates fall within this ballpark for those of us who live in developed societies: between 75 and 80 years old. What does that mean? 75 years are almost 27,394 days; 657,450 hours; 39,447,000 minutes; or 2,366,820,000 seconds.80 years...

Brothers and Sisters: Peace be with you. I've learned the following news from the Aleteia Catholic news portal: Yesterday a rally took place outside the Canadian Embassy in Warsaw, Poland to protest the Christmas Eve incarceration of Canadian Mary Wagner. She is being held in the Vanier Centre for Women in Milton, Ontario, a medium/maximum security correctional facility. Wagner was arrested for the crime of entering the waiting room of an abortion clinic on December 23—this time, the Bloor West Village Women’s Clinic in Toronto—and quietly offering individual women a rose with a card stating where they could learn about...

Brethren, Peace be with you. Today's Islamofascist terrorist attack in Paris, France must remind us that vigilance for the defense of liberty is no vice, but a virtue. However, the virtue will soon be under attack, not only by the Islamofascists themselves, but by domestic voices in Europe and in America seeking to limit our freedom of expression at the expense of Muslim susceptibilities here and over there. Like my freedom to state that God is Great, yes, but that Muhammad is not his prophet, that Islam is humanity's one unnecessary religion, that the Koran is no more inspired than...

Brethren: Peace be with you on this Feast of Christ the King. Before I launch upon this post, I have a confession to make: I am first and foremost, a monarchist. Yes, I am! Don't feel threatened, though, for neither my King nor his Kingdom are of this world. While on earth, I'm a republican and a constitutionalist, with all the attending messes these typf of government entails. Why am I a republican? Because I agree with the Founding Fathers of the USA, who denied some people were better than others by reason of birth and therefore, some were born...

Brethren, Peace be with you and a'salaam aleikum! William Kirkpatrick over at the Catholic World Report asks the following question Are We Losing the Apologetics War with Islam? in light of recent lone-wolf terrorist attacks in Canada and the United States, as well as the romance many attach to the depredations of the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. One of the Canadian terrorists had this illustration displayed in his Facebook page: That got me thinking because that very day I stumbled upon this tweet by the Muslim Times on-line publication: An inspection of The Muslim Times reveals a...

Brethren, Peace be with you. Observing the media coverage of the ongoing Synod of Bishops in Rome, I wondered how the media would have covered that first "synod" or gathering of Christians in Jerusalem in 50 A.D. Please join me in this imaginative tour as we accompany a Roman journalist in his investigation and reporting.    Conflict in Jerusalem: Conservative Palestinian Jews and Liberal Jews from the Diaspora Battle for the Soul of the Christos' Way. Jerusalem, Saturday, eve before the XVI kalends of November, DCCCIII a. U. C.  Representatives of the Christos' movement from Judea, Syria, and elsewhere in...

Brethren, Peace be with you in Jesus Christ our Lord. Inaugural Mass of the Synod of Bishops in Rome There's been a lot of misunderstanding regarding the interim report issued by the Synod of Bishops this last weekend. Much of the misunderstanding is due to a New York Times (NYT) article formerly titled Vatican Signals More Tolerance Toward Gays and Remarriage since renamed At the Vatican, a Shift in Tone Toward Gays and Divorce - probably because they were so far off the mark in the first place. (George Weigel's take on the NYT article dispatches the MSM approach...

Peace be with you in Jesus Christ, the Captain of our Lives. Today we celebrate Columbus Day in the USA - October 12 in my native Puerto Rico. I observe and celebrate it with pride. Columbus is the man the PC crowd loves to hate. In my view, he did very well for a man in his milieu. He was devout, but not a "canonizable" saint, if you get my meaning. He did much better in his vital surroundings than Thomas Jefferson did in his. Yet, we tend to celebrate the latter as a paragon of liberty which he wasn't...

Brethren: Peace be with all of you in Jesus Christ, the Author of Life. You may be aware of the recent declarations by Ms. Brittany Maynard regarding her desire to end her life in order to avoid a painful death by cancer. If not, you may watch and listen to her yourself here. Beautiful, serious, composed, and still full of life, Ms. Maynard tells us why she will take her own life next month in anticipation of her death by an inoperable brain tumor. Rather than allowing nature to follow its course, she will take her destiny in her own...

Brethren, Peace to you all in Jesus Christ, our Supreme, Merciful Judge. This is in the news at this time: WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court has turned away appeals from five states seeking to prohibit same-sex marriages, paving the way for an immediate expansion of gay and lesbian unions. The justices on Monday did not comment in rejecting appeals from Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The court's order immediately ends delays on marriage in those states. Couples in six other states should be able to get married in short order. That would make same-sex marriage legal in 30...

In which Teófilo reflects about two recent developments in the Church, the onslaught against the Culture of life, the words of Pope Francis, and the five non-negotiable moral teachings of the Church, and the letter Teófilo wrote to Pope Francis a year ago. Brethren: Peace be with you. As you know, I am and always will be a faithful son of the Church and servant of the current Successor of Peter. That loyalty is based upon faith and it is unconditional. I make no excuses for disobeying Pope Francis or any Pope whatsoever, even when he speaks as a personal...

Brethren, Peace be with all of you in Jesus Christ our Lord, the Church's faithful spouse whom we are called to emulate. There has been some discussion inside and outside the Church about changing the discipline surrounding the Sacrament of Marriage in the name of "mercy," by allowing some Catholics living in irregular unions to receive Holy Communion. Some of the cheer-leading is mere spin by the mainstream media. Other such hand-wringing comes from a senior churchman who then cried "foul" at public criticism of his public stance. My position is with the Church's historical Tradition and teaching regarding the institution...

News Analysis Brethren, Peace be with you. I'm still working on my next post on immigration. I apologize for being sidetracked by events. President Barack Obama's silence is deafening across many issues needing his often eloquent voice. Let me give you three examples: • During a "green on blue" attack, an Afghan soldier killed Major General Harold Greene in Kabul on August 5th, and a German brigadier wounded along with 13 others. The President's reaction? I'm still waiting for one. • This morning I received a communication from the Iraq and Afghanistan's Veterans of America (IAVA) focusing on the high...

Brethren: Peace be with you. I want to share with you one more e-zine project by yours truly: New Christian Martyrs. The hand-picked documents I'll put in here will document what Pope Francis has called "the new ecumenism of blood", that is, the blood shed by trinitarian Christians worldwide in imitation of Christ and for His sake. I will also the more subtle yet blatant persecution that Christians are suffering in developed countries, particularly in the U.S. The magazine is better appreciated when you subscribe to it via the Flipboard app for either your Apple or Android device. Also, you...