THANK YOU to readers who have generously donated. However, I still have a long way to go with my fundraising campaign. Unfortunately (or fortunately), if I don't reach my modest goal by February 7th, this blog will become a subscription e-mail magazine. I will explain how this will work later. The nice thing about a magazine is that it would allow for longer pieces about the issues discussed here. Anyone who donates will receive some number of editions of this magazine, which I hope will include commentary by regular contributors here, whom readers have come to know and appreciate. Please donate today if you'd like to help prevent this change -- or let me know if you want to donate but actually prefer the idea of a magazine format. Thank you again for your support. [thermometer width=70 align=center]

    DON VINCENZO writes: I was at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Never in all my years have I seen such a multitude gathered for any one event as I did yesterday. I'd bet the numbers come to more than a half-million. Do any good? The GOP pulled the "no abortions after 20 week gestation" bill Thursday because they didn't have the votes despite their super majority, and those "no" votes included at least two Tea Party women. The bill it pushed through the House yesterday would block federal financing of abortion. It is a rethread of current federal law. It took little or no courage at all by the GOP and has little chance of success. I increasingly have reached the conclusion that the Romans did long ago: Nolite confidere in principibus - place not your trust in princes, and I can add politicians, too.

MRS. T. writes:

Your recent posts on large families and rabbit breeding have really hit home for me.

I am the second oldest of nine children from a Catholic family. Growing up, I constantly heard how my parents “bred like rabbits.” I would usually reply something along the lines of, “Nine times in x amount of years isn’t a lot.” Can you imagine a 12-year-old girl having to defend her parent’s intimacies, their God-given marital rights?? How vastly inappropriate. I grew up predominately in the 90s so I suppose this mentality should be of no surprise. (more…)

HERE are pictures from before Vatican II Revolution and its overhauling of the highest form of worship, the Catholic Mass, which has its roots in Jewish ceremony and pagan sacrifice and from which 70 percent of the ancient prayers, many of which dated from the earliest days and centuries of the Church, were removed. Below is a video of the recent "Mega Mass" in the Phillipines.

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BY WHAT principle can supporters of “marriage equality” deny the right for a father to marry his son? A blogger who was raised by a lesbian asks this question.

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MARY writes:

Lately it seems more than ever I hear the canard that religion causes war and when religion is finally gone we will achieve “world peace.” Those who believe this claim fail to recognize that simple truth that man is hard-wired for worship; absent the true God in his life man will always orient those energies toward something else: the state, secularism, power, money. Gathering up this refocused energy – often unwittingly provided by weak, non-religious liberals – the greatest evil gains its power. Look no farther than Stalin to see how much justice and peace the absence of religion generates.

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  "Birth control leads to two things — no births and no control."    ---- G.K. Chesterton

  ACCORDING to Voice of America, those who know a bit about the private lives of rabbits are none too pleased with "Pope" Francis's recent remarks suggesting rabbits are irresponsible parents. Apparently rabbits are more restrained than is commonly believed. In captivity at least, they definitely do not observe God's injunction to "be fruitful and multiply:" Speaking Tuesday with Deutsche Presse Agentur, Erwin Leowsky, president of the central council of the Association of German Rabbit Breeders, took issue with pope’s analogy, saying that only rabbits that live in the wild are sexually overactive. He said those in captivity have tamer reproductive habits. Leowsky also said he thought Francis should skip the misleading cliches about rabbits and allow Catholics to use contraceptives. It occurs to me that rabbits in captivity may have a lot in common with human beings in captivity. Captivity, that is, to lies. Lies about life, about the human soul, about immortality (or the lack of it) and about what God wants from us. Anyway, rabbits don't get into any of that. They really don't have many "issues." Read more on Rabbits vs. Catholics here.

  CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, who unfortunately calls herself a feminist, addresses a couple of the major myths surrounding sexual assault on campus.

  NANCY writes: Just last night, before reading your request this morning, I decided that I should send you a donation. So, this is not really a response to your post, but a sincere gift of gratitude for all you do. Honestly, I don't know what I'd do without you. I click onto your site many times a day to see if there is anything new to read and ponder. You keep me sane. [thermometer width=70 align=center]

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Your post about the Canadian lady MP who serially misses votes in the Commons, citing maternal obligations as an excuse, caught my eye.  Canada is emphatically not some northern America that differs only in still having the Queen.  Canada is quite different from the United States, and Canadians – who don’t always love their messy superpower neighbour to the south – are at pains to keep it that way.  When Canada beat the United States in overtime to win the 2010 Olympic hockey gold medal, the national rejoicing was as much over whom the “patriot sons” had beaten as the fact they were champions.  The curious case of Sana Hassainia exemplifies the problems of over-diverse Canada, and by extension the West overall, in microcosm.

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JOHANN SEBASTIEN BACH bred like a rabbit. He may have been a musical genius, but when it came to procreation, he was on the level of a four-footed lagomorph. Bach fathered a total of 20 children, with the first born when he was 23 and the last by his second wife when he was 57.

I expect someone is now going to write to me and say that contraceptive methods were not available in the 18th century, which is not true, or that people had many more children back then because infant mortality was high, suggesting that Bach and his two wives did not really want that many children, they were just hedging their bets. If that’s the case, they really went too far. Ten of Bach’s 20 children survived into full-grown rabbit hood. While that’s quite a high mortality rate by today’s standards, that’s still a heck of a lot of rabbits by today’s standards. By the way, whether the Bachs wanted their children or not is irrelevant. They had them. They gave them life. It possibly never occurred to them to wonder how many they wanted.

It is often said of parents of former times that they only had large families because they were seeking help to till the fields or because infant mortality was high and contraception unavailable. Supposedly they were selfish and only had children for utilitarian reasons or were uncontrollable rabbits. While today’s enlightened parents have fewer children but want them for the right reasons.

These are easy accusations. Those maligned and misrepresented parents cannot speak up for themselves. Nevertheless, whatever they wanted or didn’t want, they did a much better job of affirming life and providing for future generations, who were the beneficiaries of their fertility.

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  MATTHEW S. writes: What a beautiful testimony from Pope Pius XII to the joys of a large family, written in the year that my parents welcomed me, their fifth child. Sadly I drank the Professional Success Kool Aid, delaying parenthood and therefore restricting myself to three children (for whom I daily thank God, grateful for the joy they have brought me). Everything the Holy Father says about the particular kinds of happiness experienced in large families is indisputably true. Some would say that my parents, who eventually had six children, "bred like rabbits." But I would ask the current "pope:" Which of the six of us is superfluous?

IT’S been about 14 months since my last fundraiser. I thought about conducting one at Christmastime, but it seems that everyone is asking for money during the Christmas season and besides I was very busy taking care of a relative, so I decided to wait. Now that you are coping with Christmas bills and are dead broke, here I am asking you to support this kiosk on the Internet highway. It’s not primarily about money, this place, but money helps compensate for the personal sacrifices and hard work.  (more…)

  FROM Campus Reform: Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s school, announced in a campus-wide email that the Theatre Board has cancelled its annual production of the “Vagina Monologues.” The board has decided to retire the feminist classic as it is not “inclusive” enough to those who identify as women but do not have vaginas. The school recently decided to admit male students who identify as women.

  PADRE PIO said the ideal family size is eight children. Papa Frank says Catholics must not think of having "children in a series."

JORGE BERGOGLIO’S latest air raid against immutable Catholic dogma took place yesterday. The Man Who Would Be Pope, while on a plane from the Phillipines, discussed the issue of contraception, initially seeming to endorse the Catholic view, which is nothing less than a recognition of the objective reality that human life is always good, and then wildly veering off into the vaporous Bergoglian stratosphere in order to hone in on his target. [There are many news reports on what he said to a plane full of reporters. Here is one.] He clearly suggested parents have the moral responsibility to limit births through natural means.

Now that he has embraced global warming and hugged Marxist Cuba, it was only a matter of time before Jorge said the world is too crowded.

Catholics should not “breed like rabbits,” Bergoglio anti-pontificated, as if human beings when in abundant supply are akin to animals, as if Catholics have bred like rabbits.

Well, you know. Anything contemptuous that can be said about believing Catholics and Divine Law will be said by the Argentine Bomber. “God gives you methods to be responsible,” he said. In other words, it is irresponsible to welcome children with no limitations.

Fatuous Frank, who by virtue of his defection from the Faith isn’t even a member of the Catholic Church let alone the reigning pontiff, even went so far as to criticize a Catholic woman for having an eighth child when the pregnancy was risky. His statement, coming as the Western world (and much of the rest of the world) descends into demographic winter, was so bold it’s hard to absorb. “That is to tempt God,” he said. “… That is an irresponsibility.” Compare Bergolio’s words to those of Pope Pius XII in his “Address to Large Families” in 1958:

Large families are the most splendid flower-beds in the garden of the Church; happiness flowers in them and sanctity ripens in favorable soil. Every family group, even the smallest, was meant by God to be an oasis of spiritual peace. But there is a tremendous difference: where the number of children is not much more than one, that serene intimacy that gives value to life has a touch of melancholy or of pallor about it; it does not last as long, it may be more uncertain, it is often clouded by secret fears and remorse.

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