Free Republic

CNA Staff, Jun 23, 2020 / 07:01 pm MT (CNA).- The Bishop of Metuchen led a prayer service for racial harmony and justice Friday, urging Catholics to focus on the eradication of racism. Bishop James Checchio held the prayer service at the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi June 19. “Evil is real and even more dangerous than the coronavirus,” he said during his homily, challenging Catholics to pray and sacrifice for an end to racism, adding that “we need to address this national plague [of racism] with the same intensity we are using in our efforts to eradicate the...

A toddler and a 10-year-old girl were among 14 people shot to death in Chicago in yet another weekend of gun violence that has rocked the city over the past month. Between Friday and Sunday morning, a total of 52 people were shot in Chicago, according to police department records. "As a mother, I am tired of the funerals. I am tired of burying our children," Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted, adding that the city was in the throes of a "gun violence epidemic." The latest carnage in the Windy City comes just a week after more than 100 people...

Video: Thanks to liberal progressive power, Seattle is Dying Trash, homelessness, drugs, crime

Gay Pride was held today in Chicago. Hundreds, if not thousands, flocked to the annual party in downtown Chicago. Of course, the media cheered this crowd since it was not a Trump rally.

[Catholic Caucus] Bishop ‘sidelines’ pro-life, pro-family priest Father Joseph Klee of the Diocese of Columbus, Ohio, has been “sidelined” for an indefinite period of time by his bishop, Robert J. Brennan. I’ve featured the staunchly pro-life, pro-family priest-activist in four of my past columns: here, here, here and here. In 2017, Klee was hit by a car driven by an angry abortion supporter during a pro-life demonstration. Klee has also contributed articles to Homiletic and Pastoral Review. The following statement was released by the diocese on June 22, 2020: The Catholic Church proposes a beautiful, life-giving and liberating vision to...

Republican President Donald Trump lashed out Friday night at Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Lori Lightfoot over Chicago’s gun violence, saying the two had put their “own political interests” ahead of the lives of residents and insisting that “law and order” was needed. In a letter, Trump also used the violence issue as a jumping off point to attack the state and city for high taxes and burdensome regulations, contending Pritzker and Lightfoot’s “insatiable appetite” for taxes has led people to flee Illinois. A Pritzker spokeswoman said Trump’s letter was a “press stunt” aimed at serving as a distraction...

Governor Pritzker and Mayor Lightfoot: I write to you today to call your attention to and urge action on the devastating violence in Chicago. I have been horrified by the continued violence in this great American city. The American people (hardworking taxpayers) send you millions of dollars in Federal funding each year to support public safety in Chicago. In 2018 and 2019, Chicago benefited from $136 million in funding from the Urban Area Security Initiative Grant Program, and another $68 million was recently announced for Chicago from this important program. The Department of Justice awarded and is in the process...

Peter Newell, 77, has been sentenced to prison Victim was 12 years old at the time Newell was a top official at the Association for the Protection of All Children charity, which was funded in part by the United Nations

rish comedy writer Graham Linehan has been permanently banned from Twitter after he tweeted "men aren't women tho" in response to a tweet by a women's group wishing men who identify as women a happy Pride Month. Lineman, who had hundreds of thousands of followers on the social network, is the creator or co-creator of the sitcoms Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. Twitter said Linehan "has been permanently suspended after repeated violations of our rules against hateful conduct and platform manipulation."

Joseph Meaney, PH.D., speaking Friday in an interview on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, said that the experiment gone wrong was predictable, because “science, as it emerges into new areas, makes a lot of mistakes.” WASHINGTON — In the wake of a gene-editing experiment gone wrong, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center said that the Church must stand firm against the unborn being “sacrificed on the altar of scientific research.” Medium’s science publication OneZero reported last week that scientists in the United Kingdom recently conducted an experiment where they deleted a gene from human embryos using the CRISPR technique. They...

The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln Dick Cheney.... welcome to the resistance. (sharing picture of Liz Cheney’s tweet of her dad in facemask. Liz tweets: “Dick Cheney says ‘wear a mask’”) https://mobile.twitter.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1276631145996845058

At least 20 people were shot, seven fatally, during a 24-hour timeframe this weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago. NBC Chicago reports the first non-fatal shooting occurred around 4 p.m. Friday, when a 31-year-old was shot and wounded while riding in a vehicle “in the 10300 block of South Halsted.” The man was transported to the hospital in good condition. Just under 24 hours later, at 3:50 p.m. Saturday, a 28-year-old man was found on South Phillips with “a gunshot wound to the chest, the neck and the right arm.” The victim was transported to the hospital in critical...

Minneapolis has elected two black transgender representatives to its City Council, adding to what advocacy groups have described as a banner election for transgender people in public office. Andrea Jenkins easily won the race Tuesday night for an open seat in South Minneapolis, with roughly 73 percent of the vote. Jenkins, a 56-year-old poet and historian who transitioned in her 30s, spent years as a policy aide to two previous council members in the same ward. Phillipe Cunningham’s victory took longer because of Minneapolis’ instant-runoff voting system. But by Wednesday afternoon, the city announced Cunningham — a 29-year old transgender...

[Barf Alert] Assisi summit to focus on pope’s challenge to ‘pathological’ economy ROSARIO, Argentina – An Argentine priest and activist says a major summit set for November in the iconic Italian city of Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, will showcase the vision of the pope who took Francis’s name for a sweeping, person-centered reform of the “pathological” state of the global economy.“Pope Francis from Evangelii Gaudium to Laudato Si has extended an invitation to implement a new economic model that puts the human person at the center and that reduces unjust inequalities,” said Father Claudio Caruso, who leads Cronica...

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (Inside INdiana Business) – Former South Bend mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has been named a 2020-2021 faculty fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Buttigieg joins a group of more than 30 faculty and student fellows who will be conducting research on the nature of trust, the institute’s 2020-2021 research theme. The university says Buttigieg will work on two research projects: one that explores how to restore trust in political institutions and another that considers the forces shaping the 2020s. As an NDIAS faculty fellow, Notre Dame says Buttigieg...

Playing the role of Judas Goat, leading people to be oppressed in the name of liberalism worked just fine for Maya Dillard Smith right up until it was her daughters who were asked to accept deep voiced men in their lady’s room. Backing every socially destructive scheme the ACLU could conjure up was a comfortable way of life for Smith, who was the interim director of a Georgia ACLU chapter. Making landlords rent to newly released vicious prison inmates, forcing employers to hire incompetent lazy and counter productive workers and forcing “Heather Has Two Mommies” type books onto 2nd grade...

In the last decade, diagnosis of “gender dysphoria” — severe discomfort in one’s biological sex — has exploded across the West. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the US quadrupled; in the UK, the rates of gender dysphoria for teenage girls are up 4,400 percent over the previous decade. An ailment that typically began in early childhood, and overwhelmingly afflicted males, suddenly has a new dominant demographic: teenage girls. In 2016, Brown University public health researcher Lisa Littman was scrolling through social media when she noticed that a group of teen girls from...

Transgender Hollywood star Laverne Cox and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) pushed for the defunding of the police in a joint appearance Thursday on Watch What Happens Live, during which Sen. Harris said that putting more cops on the streets is “just wrong.” Laverne Cox expressed her enthusiasm about the Defund the Police movement in the virtual conversation. “The fact that there’s a national conversation about defunding the police, I think is remarkable. And that people of all races are having that conversation is really exciting to me.”

A revealing book by a veteran Vatican journalist is kickstarting prognostications about Pope Francis' successor by shortlisting the most eligible cardinals likely to fill the shoes of the fisherman. The first of its kind, Edward Pentin's meticulously researched handbook to the next conclave provides a panoramic and penetrating study into the theological, doctrinal, liturgical, moral and social beliefs of 19 front-runners for the papacy. The Next Pope: The Leading Cardinal Candidates, published by Sophia Institute Press, names Tridentine Mass traditionalists like American cardinal Raymond Burke alongside Austrian cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who promotes "blasphemy" through heavy metal Masses and homosexual activism....

The Anglican church should rethink depictions of Jesus as a white man in traditional Christian imagery, the head of the Church of England said Friday. Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, was asked in an interview with BBC Radio 4 if the Western mindset that Jesus looked Caucasian needs to be reconsidered in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Yes of course it does, this sense that God was white … You go into churches [around the world] and you don’t see a white Jesus,” he said. “You see a black Jesus, a Chinese Jesus, a Middle-Eastern Jesus — which...