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The Satanic Temple unveiled its statue Thursday of a goat-headed, winged creature called Baphomet during a First Amendment rally at the Arkansas State Capitol to protest a Ten Commandments monument already on the Capitol grounds. With Satanists, atheists and Christians among those in attendance, several speakers called for the removal of the Ten Commandments monument or for state government officials to install Baphomet as well. The Satanic Temple said the Ten Commandments monument violates constitutional freedom of religion rights and that installation of their statue will demonstrate religious tolerance. Satanic Arkansas cofounder Ivy Forrester, who helped organize the rally,...

Pope Francis delivered a Holy Thursday homily for a congregation of priests attending Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome in which he told them that they “can” tell adulterers to “go and sin no more,” but should not do it “with the legalistic tone of truth as definition.” Instead, he told them, they should do it with the “tone of truth as fidelity.” “I suggest that you meditate on three areas of priestly closeness where the words, ‘Do everything Jesus tells you,’ need to be heard—in a thousand different ways but with the same motherly tone—in the hearts of...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Francis, starting Holy Week services leading to Easter, urged young people on Sunday to keep shouting and not allow the older generations to silence their voices or anesthetize their idealism. Francis spoke a day after hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters answered a call to action from survivors of last month’s Florida high school massacre and rallied across the United States to demand tighter gun laws. He did not mention the demonstrations. Catholic News Service (CNS) said Gabriella Zuniga, 16, and her sister Valentina, 15, both students from Stoneman Douglas High School...

Archdiocese of Washington The Ten Commandments Are a Picture of the Transformed Human Person – A Homily for the 3rd Sunday of Lent Msgr. Charles Pope • March 3, 2018 • The first reading this Sunday (Year B) contains the Ten Commandments and thereby communicates a brief but sweeping summary of the Christian and biblical moral vision. Too often, there is a tendency to reduce the Christian moral vision to a set of rules. It is sad that many people today resent the Church for her “rules” because of this reductionist notion. Every group or activity has rules. If you...

One of the symptoms indicating the unprecedented severity of the current ecclesial crisis is the astounding level of prolixity in Church documents as compared with the declarative simplicity of pre-Vatican II Church teaching.  Even the very longest pre-conciliar encyclicals (e.g. Pius XII’s Mystici corporis or Saint Pius X’s Pascendi) run to about 20,000 words, including extensive footnotes, and their texts are models of clarity and precision.  Today, however, we are routinely burdened with book-length manifestos such as Laudato si’, Evangelii Gaudium and, of course, Amoris Laetitia, which are more than twice as long but say little or nothing about the...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sided with a lower court that ordered a New Mexico city to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the lawn outside City Hall. Civil liberties advocates behind the case called the decision involving the city of Bloomfield a victory for the separation of church and state. ACLU of New Mexico Executive Director Peter Simonson said it sends a “strong message that the government should not be in the business of picking and choosing which sets of religious beliefs enjoy special favor in the community.” However, David Cortman, a senior counsel and vice president of...

The jubilation felt among hardcore conservatives over Judge Roy Moore’s win in the Republican primary runoff Tuesday night also brought recrimination from the Democratic left and the sophisticated right. After Moore’s triumph, the wife of a top White House official wrote on social media, “For the first time in my life, I have to say, I’m embarrassed to say I’m from Alabama.” Moore’s Democrat rival Doug Jones on the same night took to social media to announce, “After years of embarrassing headlines about the top public officials in this state, this race is about the people of Alabama and about...

The sermon was titled “Fatal Attraction.” It was a cautionary message to those of us who were married members of the congregation to scrupulously observe the wedding vows we took according to God’s holy ordinance: To have and to hold each other from our wedding day forward. To forsake all others who might come between us. To love each other, comfort each other and keep each other, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness, in health, until death do us part. But wait, said the junior pastor. He had an additional vow to suggest to Christ- following...

A Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Arkansas state capitol has been destroyed less than 24 hours after it was erected. Police say Michael Tate Reed was taken into custody after he plowed his vehicle into the $26,000 monument – toppling the historical and moral foundation of American law. Reed was also arrested 2014 in connection with a similar attack on a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma. Reed allegedly posted video of the Little Rock attack on his Facebook page. On the video he yells "freedom" and then rams the monument. Watch the video below. “This was an...

On Tuesday, a statue of the Ten Commandments was installed at the Arkansas Capitol grounds. Less than a day later, it had been run over by a car and destroyed. Michael Reed, a 32-year-old from Van Buren, Arkansas with a history of mental illness, recorded himself ramming his car into the monument, shouting "freedom" shortly before impact. Reed has previously been accused of destroying a similar Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma.

A man yelled "Freedom!" as he crashed his vehicle into Arkansas' new Ten Commandments monument early Wednesday, nearly three years after he was arrested in the destruction of Oklahoma's monument at its state Capitol, authorities said. The privately funded Arkansas monument had been in place outside the state Capitol in Little Rock for less than 24 hours before it was knocked from its plinth and smashed to pieces. Michael Tate Reed, 32, of Van Buren, Arkansas, was booked in the Pulaski County jail shortly after 7:30 a.m. on preliminary charges of defacing objects of public interest, criminal trespass and first-degree...

The instructions laid out two months ago by the general of the Society of Jesus, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, on “what Jesus really said” regarding marriage and divorce have not fallen on deaf ears.On the contrary, some among the Jesuits have been the first to apply them in full. To conclude that “once a marriage is dead” Jesus too would allow divorce today.The Jesuit who has drawn this conclusion from the premises set up by his superior general is not a nobody. He is Fr. Thomas Reese, former editor of the magazine of the New York Jesuits, “America,” and a...

The earliest known stone inscription of the Ten Commandments is being auctioned in Beverly Hills on November 16, with an opening bid of $250,000 -- and a stipulation that any owner must put the tablet on public display. Described as a "national treasure" of Israel, the stone was first uncovered in 1913 during excavations for a railroad station near Yavneh in Israel and is the only intact tablet version of the Commandments thought to exist.

An American Hindu organization says that it will renew its pursuit to erect a statue of the Hindu god Hanuman at the Oklahoma State Capitol if residents vote next week to allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed. . . "...Hindus would love to request placing a statue of Lord Hanuman, which might become the first Hindu religious monument on public land in USA,” the Universalist Society of Hinduism in Nevada said in a statement on Wednesday.

A granite monument of the Ten Commandments planned near Arkansas’ Capitol will weigh 6,000 pounds and stand more than 6 feet tall, the group lined up to install the display said in an application filed Monday. The American History and Heritage Foundation detailed its plans for the privately-funded monument in papers submitted to the secretary of state’s office. The majority-Republican Legislature and GOP Gov. Asa Hutchinson approved a law last year that requires the state to allow the monument to be built on Capitol grounds. …

A provocative $4-million documentary by Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici claims to have found archeological evidence verifying the story of the biblical Exodus from Egypt, 3,500 years ago. Religious Jews consider the biblical account incontrovertible — the foundation story of the creation of the nation of Israel. Indeed, they celebrated the Exodus Wednesday night and last night with the annual Passover recitation of the Haggadah. But among scholars, the question of if and when Moses led an estimated two million Israelite slaves out of pharaonic Egypt, miraculously crossed the Red Sea ahead of the pursuing Egyptian army and received the Ten...

For those who have never been to Mitzpe Ramon, you’re missing out. It’s on the edge of the Ramon makhtesh -- Israel’s Grand Canyon. In fact, although it is called a “crater” in English, it is actually a “makhtesh” i.e., a “box canyon”, formed not by a meteor or a river, but by geological processes of a receding ocean. It is the world’s largest “makhtesh”! ... In any event, no one listened, but everyone had a lot of fun. My friend Hershel Shanks who moderated my session chided me for being too confident. He wanted me to have an appropriate...

It has taken him more than a decade, but Italian-Israeli archeologist Prof. Emmanuel Anati now believes his controversial view that the biblical Mount Sinai is in Israel’s Negev desert rather than Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula will soon be adopted by the Vatican. On Friday, he presented his theory in the form of a new book at a seminar at the Theological Seminary in the northeastern Italian city of Vicenza. “Actually it’s not a theory, it’s a reality. I’m sure of it, Anati told The Jerusalem Post by telephone from his home in Capo di Ponte. “My archeological discoveries at Har Karkom...

In the 10th century B.C., in the hill country south of Jerusalem, a scribe carved his A B C's on a limestone boulder - actually, his aleph-beth-gimel's, for the string of letters appears to be an early rendering of the emergent Hebrew alphabet. Archaeologists digging in July at the site, Tel Zayit, found the inscribed stone in the wall of an ancient building. After an analysis of the layers of ruins, the discoverers concluded that this was the earliest known specimen of the Hebrew alphabet and an important benchmark in the history of writing, they said this week. If they...

Oklahoma voters will decide in November whether to abolish an article of the state constitution so that a Ten Commandments monument can be returned to the Capitol grounds. The House voted 65-7 late Thursday for a resolution calling for a statewide vote on whether to remove a constitutional prohibition on the use of state funds to support a religion. The state Supreme Court relied on that section of the constitution in June when it ordered a 6-foot-tall granite Ten Commandments monument moved from the Capitol grounds. The monument’s removal angered many Oklahomans, particularly Republican lawmakers who vowed to return the...