IN the Middle Ages, there were dozens of feast days during the course of the year, days in which almost all refrained from work of any kind, participated in solemn liturgies and celebrated. The atmosphere of the saints’ days was permeated, one imagines, with love and honor for a particular hero of holiness. One of those feast days was the Feast of St. Joseph, which is celebrated today in America with private observance here and there, especially in the South. There is no public acclaim for this holy man who participated in the greatest drama in history. Almost no one takes the day off. It’s just not considered that important. But then to most Americans, the saints don’t exist. The greatest friends a person could have are invisible.

From Dom Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year:

Who can imagine or worthily describe the sentiments which filled the heart of this man, whom the Gospel describes to us in one word, when it calls him the just man (St. Matth. i. 19.)? (more…)

DON VINCENZO writes:

Recently, I wrote about the passing of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who presided over the University of Notre Dame for thirty five years (1952-87), and under whose tutelage this once Catholic university morphed into a secular one, although his successors forcefully persist in claiming that nothing has changed, which, given the current state of affairs at the university, assures me that they are in a state of serious denial, which is not a river in Egypt. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

There are hopeful developments in the Mikey Weinstein v. Christians in Uniform story I forwarded last week.  Someone in the U.S. Air Force has found his spine, and Mr. Weinstein has run into resistance.  Something unusual for him in recent years, I’m sure. (more…)

BILL writes:

I have no idea how you can say the current pope is not Catholic, as it logically leads to certain contradictions. By what authority do you declare yourself Catholic and the pope not Catholic? And how does this not make you a Protestant?

(more…)

FROM a letter to The Wall Street Journal by Em. Prof. Gordon E. Finley of Florida Intl. University, Miami:

In the U.S. today, the only citizens who can be imprisoned for debt are fathers in arrears for child support. The parent-to-prison pathway generally goes something like this: Fall behind in child support, and the state takes away all professional and drivers’ licenses. This makes it impossible for fathers to generate income, and so the arrears increase, the father goes to debtors prison, and with a prison record it becomes exceedingly difficult to impossible to ever get a job in the aboveground economy. The future prospects of the children of imprisoned fathers are uniformly bleak, especially when compounded with the well-established findings that children from single-mother families have the worst developmental outcomes of all family forms. (more…)

IN ALL the public bemoaning of the obesity epidemic in childhood and adolescence, the elephant in the room  is almost always ignored. The problem mushroomed with the mass entry of women into the workforce. From a 2014 article by Katherine Bauer analyzing a study that shows a link between maternal employment and poor dietary habits in teens: Indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, the researchers argue that “efforts such as engaging all family members in meal preparation to alleviate burden on working women could contribute to improvements in family food environments on a population level.” A less fanciful interpretation of the findings would indicate that Americans should be looking for ways to get back to what they once had—homemaking mothers.  It is hard to imagine a healthy nutritional future for the nation’s teens without many more such mothers.

P. G. writes in response to the previous post:

Education has become a form of incarceration, confining innocents to terms from 12-25 years for the so-called knowledge it apportions out in carefully rationed amounts in order to consume one third of the average person’s life span. That an institution can hold your life hostage for what Tom Bertonneau called “justification in advance” is a testimony to the power of propaganda. If it’s considered unethical for parents to chose medical treatment for their children, why is it okay to make children go somewhere they likely don’t want to go – for twelve years.

The average family now starts its income accumulation nearly thirteen years later than it would have historically, creating the conditions where they must use school as a form of warehousing to recover enough income to make up for the lost time.  (more…)

A sixth-grader in Virginia was suspended for a year after he was falsely accused of having a marijuana leaf in his backpack. According to The Washington Post:

The student, the 11-year-old son of two school teachers, had to enroll in the district’s alternative education program and be homeschooled. He was evaluated by a psychiatrist for substance abuse problems, and charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court. In the months since September, he’s become withdrawn, depressed, and he suffers from panic attacks. He is worried his life is over, according to his mother, and that he will never get into college. (more…)

  CARDINAL James Gibbons (1834-1921), protesting the Holy See ’s condemnation of the works of the socialist Henry George, wrote: In dealing with so practicable a people as the Americans , in whose genius bizarre and impracticable ideas quickly find their grave, it seems to me that prudence suggests that absurdities and fallacies be allowed to perish by themselves, and not run the risk of giving them an importance, a life and an artificial force by the intervention of the tribunals of the Church. {Cited here.} On September 12, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for president at the time, told a gathering of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association: But let me stress again that these are my views—for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who cannot reasonably be considered a cardinal of the Catholic Church, is grand marshal of the 2015 New York City St. Patrick's Day parade, which takes place today and which allows an openly homosexual group for the first time. He said: “The most important question I had to ask myself was this: does the new policy violate Catholic faith or morals? If it does, then the Committee has compromised the integrity of the…

The gravity of sin is determined by the interval which it places between man and God; now sin against faith, divides man from God as far as possible, since it deprives him of the true knowledge of God; it therefore follows that sin against faith is the greatest of all sins. --- St. Thomas Aquinas

DON VINCENZO writes:

It is rare –  truly rare – that a member of the modern-minded “Catholic” clergy will actually stand up and be counted for his steadfast commitment to a  dogmatic belief that has been part of the Church’s long tradition, for the members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops prefer to take the path of least resistance in dealing with anything or anyone that might, horror or horrors, bring bad publicity. But, God works in wondrous ways. Take the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Norfolk, Virginia. (more…)

A NORWEGIAN MAN faces a possible seven-year-term for putting drugs in a woman's drink that caused her to miscarry their child. He should face a very severe term, more severe than even this. But why is it illegal for him to kill the unborn child and not illegal for a woman to do it? There is no good reason why.

WH writes:

Thank you for the link to the post regarding why so few men are married. As I commented on that site (which follows below with some more explanation), there is a flip side to this as well. I commented there in exasperation. (more…)

FROM The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism by Solange Hertz:

True devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has rarely, if ever, been preached in the United States. It is too embarrassingly political.

For two hundred years the false principles that Church and state must be separate, that all men are created equal, and that authority comes from below have been imposed as a matter of public policy. It is therefore understandable that Catholics not prepared to “suffer under Pontius Pilate” have kept this flammable devotion to the Heart of God within the jug of personal piety, with little social extension beyond the family. Lest our Lord be deported as a subversive, He has been portrayed only as a yearning, all-forgiving – if not simpering – Savior desiring to clasp indiscriminately to His blazing breast any and every individual without the slightest concern for his politics. (more…)

THE blogger Mark Moncrieff, in a post from last summer, wonders why so few people he knows are married and sums up what he believes are the chief reasons. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

I have brought the anti-Christian antics of Mikey Weinstein — Air Force Academy graduate; former Air Force JAG; and – yes – former lawyer in the Reagan administration, whose atheist activism targets the U.S. armed forces — to your attention before.  I think I have also written that, based on what he does and on watching interviews with him, I wonder if Mr. Weinstein is not possessed.  The man exudes rage and malice; Mikey Weinstein always strikes me as about to explode with apoplexy. (more…)

IN THIS talk, the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira stated:

Contemplating the inequalities that exist in all ages of history and human societies, three questions come to mind:

1. Is the existence of elites just?

2. Are elites useful for the religious, moral, political and cultural common good of peoples and civilizations?

3. Precisely, what constitutes an elite? (more…)