Free Republic

Each year on May 1, the Catholic faithful celebrate the feast day of Saint Joseph the Worker. This feast day, instituted by Pope Pius XII in 1955, was meant to provide downtrodden laborers with a spiritual patron, as well as an alternative to the communist labor agitation that was prevalent at the time. The Catholic faith has a great heritage of honoring and celebrating labor and laborers. Because of that, this feast day offers us an opportunity, and a great responsibility, to build a robust and life-giving culture through laborers and their work. We must continue to take up that...

The Lord’s Prayer Is Just Fine the Way It Is St. Benedict begins his Rule, “Hearken O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart.” This fundamental principle shapes not only the life of the monk, but of every Christian. Will we listen to the words of Christ, the Lord and teacher, and conform our life to them? What is the alternative? As shocking as it is, the words of Christ are constantly explained away.“And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he...

In this present crisis in the Church, with more and more revelations of a “sodomitic filth that insinuates itself like a cancer in the ecclesiastical order” (St. Peter Damian), and the subsequent cover-ups and payoffs, the Body of Christ is pierced again with new thorns and nails, and the Mother of God is pierced again in seeing her Son’s sufferings. In bringing some good out of all the depravity, the thoughts of the hearts of many are being revealed (Lk. 2:35).The apostle Paul certainly saw the redemptive side of scandal and division: “For there must be factions among you in...

“Do you not know,” says Saint Paul to the lax and factious Corinthians, “that we shall judge angels?” They had ceded to the unbelievers around them the authority to judge a controversy between Christian brothers. But Jesus says, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” because the criterion by which we measure others will be our measure too, and we are not likely to pass that test. Does Paul contradict Jesus? Not at all.  Consider the Pharisees, who liked to pray and fast conspicuously, pulling long faces so that everyone would know they were in the grip of holiness. Jesus...

The migrant caravan is like something out of a future, apocalyptic dystopia—or, to go back in time, perhaps an image from Exodus—where thousands of men, women, and children trudge a thousand miles under the hot tropical sun across hot tarmac and dirt roads, hoping to land on America’s doorstep, in search of opportunities not to be found in the failed, crumpled, venal, socialist states from which they hail.What is President Trump to do? Welcome them all in, as one interpretation of Pope Francis’s recent exhortations seems to imply? Turn them back? If so, how? Persuasion? Water cannons? Trump has...

There is a class that most college students will take at one point in their academic career. It is the course on Western Civilization—“Western Civ” for short. It is a feeble attempt to supplement the modern college curriculum (typically in two freshman-level courses) with what used to be the very backbone of a liberal education. The course revolves around classics of the Western Tradition: Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ Meditations, and Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. But one text in particular, I think, has been subject to mistreatment and misuse—the Holy Bible.The problem is simple. One of...

Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves (Mt. 7:15).Would "false prophets" include Muhammad? It's an impolitic question to ask in these politically correct times, but, thanks to political correctness these are also highly dangerous times. Since a good deal of the danger emanates from the religion Muhammad founded, it seems reasonable to ask if he was a false prophet. And if he was, does that mean that Islam is a false religion? And if it is, why are Catholic leaders so keen on declaring their solidarity with Islam?It's a case...

The controversy over a Super Bowl ad for a snack chip that allegedly "humanized," of all things, a pre-born human being highlights the deliberate rejection of reality of the "abortion rights" objectors. On its face, as others have noted, the controversy exposes the pernicious obfuscation that a fetus is nothing more than a "meaningless blob of protoplasm." Yet, the anti-reality inherent in pro-abortion propaganda is only one example exposing the delusional foundations of modern secular culture, most prominently manifested in its ideology of sexuality, including the normalization of all manner of sexual deviance, same-sex "marriage," gender-fluidity, human-robot "intimacy," and...

“Dhimmitude,” like takfir and sharia, is a word of which Americans were happily ignorant not so long ago. Events, unfortunately, have expanded our Arabic vocabulary. As with other Islamic concepts, the meaning of dhimmitude, even its existence, is contested among Muslims. And misuse is not always merely semantic for those prone to issuing fatwas.No matter how nuanced the definition, dhimmitude always entailed a degree of subordination under Muslim rule. Historically, the dhimmi accepted second-class status as an alternative to conversion, death, or enslavement. For the privilege of being tolerated in lands under the Prophet’s sway, Christians, Jews, Hindus—any infidel—renounced...

Being a New Yorker, I only go to the top of the Empire State Building about once every thirty-five years, and I have been to the Statue of Liberty just twice. Merely once in my life have I welcomed the new year in Times Square, and I had the impression that I was the only New Yorker in the crowd. As for the opera, people who live here boycott it under its present management, and I have never shopped in Macy's, even though it is practically next-door. Only one time, as a child, did I see the Easter show...

Events of recent memory have left my head spinning in disbelief—“Caitlyn,” same-sex so-called “marriage,” three women “marrying” in South America, and, yes, “gay Catholics” and “chaste gay couples.” With me, you may wonder how all this has emerged in a short few decades of social upheaval. I may have an answer: Society has constructed an unreal cultural landscape in which things that are not sexuality are passed off as sexuality. Even a majority of Catholics are, perhaps unwittingly, swallowing this unreality, hook, line, and sinker.The fabric of this false landscape is language—language that frames everyone and everything in a...

Every three years as the Church is reading the Gospel of Mark, during the dog days of summer it stops for five weeks and turns instead to the Gospel of John for instruction on the Eucharist. We began this process July 26 with the account of the sign of the multiplication of the loaves, and will continue it August 2 and 9 as we make our way through Jesus’ “Bread of Life” discourse.Earlier this year, I wrote an article in these pages about the ongoing abuse of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, a phenomenon that become de facto established...

While much attention is understandably focused on the repercussions of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, the movement to bring the Boy Scouts of America into alignment with current LGBT orthodoxy is well underway. National Boy Scouts of America president Robert Gates announced in May that he wanted to end the organization’s blanket ban on “open and avowed” homosexual adults serving as BSA leaders. Less than 30 days later, the Cradle of Liberty Council issued a press release announcing that Council’s new policy is as follows: “Discrimination in any form, including but not limited to discrimination on the basis of...

It is interesting now to look back at the various reactions when the pope issued his encyclical on contraception. I dug up the following, and I think they pretty much speak for themselves. It is hardly necessary to add any comments at all except to say how little things have changed.A leader from an association of Protestant mainline denominations called it “the most important encyclical ever promulgated in the entire history of the papal succession.” He said, “I am glad that this pronouncement is so thoroughly clear-cut and uncompromising.” He was glad that everyone had to be either for...

On March 22, 2013, Pope Francis addressed the Diplomatic Corps with a warning against the “tyranny of relativism.” He then explained his selection of the name Francis as in part stemming from St. Francis’ battle for peace, a peace which Pope Francis underscored was impossible without Truth. The necessary struggle for truth not only remains part of the context for Francis’ choice of name, but also for his papacy. In his remarks, Francis explicitly linked his concerns with those of his predecessor Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, whom he named.In the then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily of April 18, 2005,...

Different writers here and there have talked about 1965, fifty years ago, as a year of transition. It was a year in America when trends came into focus, culture was altered, and life changed—politically, socially, culturally, morally, and in the Catholic Church. Perhaps historian James T. Patterson provided the most detailed elaboration on these developments and their implication for the country in his bluntly titled book from a song of the time, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America.First, the national policies put in place that year as LBJ launched his Great Society made the federal welfare/entitlement state...

This past Pentecost Sunday, Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila of Denver announced that the age for the reception of Confirmation would be lowered to seven. In addition, the archbishop said that he would restore the sacrament’s former place in between Baptism and First Communion. In his pastoral letter “Saints Among Us,” he explains his reasons for making the change, especially from the standpoint of theology. The archbishop quotes Pope Benedict XVI, who in Sacramentum Caritatis writes that “It must never be forgotten that our reception of Baptism and Confirmation is ordered to the Eucharist. The Holy Eucharist, then, brings Christian...

The Boy Scouts of America is a venerable institution. I can well remember when, as a Cub Scout in southern Louisiana, I learned the mysteries of initiation into the Scouts. It was exciting to become part of such a universally respected group. There were badges denoting achievement, uniforms indicating rank, handshakes conveying to other boys the hidden riches of membership, and, perhaps best of all, there was an oath.It was a galvanizing promise. One recited the oath while aiming for the heights, straining beyond one’s boyhood to glimpse the upright man that, with God’s help, one hoped to become....

The recent “draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas not only drew fire from two armed jihadists, it also drew fire from Christian leaders and media critics. One of the chief objections was that events of this type will alienate moderate Muslims and possibly drive them into the radical camp.

Christian Browne’s excellent critique of how receiving Communion-in-the-hand while standing are practices that might be reconsidered to strengthen American Catholics’ understanding of the Eucharist properly notes that these ideologically driven changes were required in no way by Vatican II or even the Holy See. Let me add three additional Eucharist-related phenomena bedeviling the “American Church” that also lack much of a doctrinal or theological base but which have become, for ideological reasons, part of the landscape of “American” Catholicism: extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, blessings in the Eucharistic procession, and the disconnect between the Sacraments of Penance and the...