FAITH is not solely a matter of reason. If it were, then belief would be as simple as understanding a mathematical equation or proof. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “To believe is an act of the understanding adhering to divine truth by command of the will, which is moved by the grace of God.” Faith involves an assent of the will. At the same time, supernatural truth is never in contradiction with reason.

“Faith and Reason,” by the Rev. Bernard Vaughan, S.J., is a very good short essay on this subject. It comes from Beautiful Pearls of Catholic Truth, starting on page 428. Here is an excerpt:

They say, then, they cannot believe in the truths of revelation, because to believe, on the word of another, what we cannot ourselves prove, is to put reason in fetters—it is mental slavery. This objection against Faith, which in one form or another is so often made to do duty against Catholic doctrine, may sound plausible at first, but I undertake to show it is very shallow, and as cowardly as it is unfair.

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  IN AN essay in The Brussels Journal on Hannah Arendt and Richard Weaver, Thomas F. Bertonneau quotes from Arendt's book Between Past and Future: “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

  NOW that the General Synod of the Church of England has voted to allow women bishops, what does this unsurprising move mean for the ailing Anglican sect? We can get an idea by looking at one of its top clerics. The most prominent member of the Anglican female clergy is the Very Rev.Vivienne Faull, who may be a candidate for Archbishop of Canterbury someday. Faull (not the attractive parson above) was once provost of Leicester Cathedral. According to The Guardian: In Leicester she helped the gradual transformation of the cathedral into a place where people of all faiths could feel at home ...

  CLICK on this great photo to get a better view of the faces.

AT HIS blog, Malcolm Pollack handily demolishes the logic of “gun control” in a few sentences. If guns were the problem, towns in Vermont would be much more dangerous than Chicago:

In Chicago, a city of 2.7 million people, fewer than 8,000 people are licensed to own a gun – less than 0.3%. The city’s gun-homicide rate is about 18 per 100,000. In Vermont, by contrast, where 42% of the population are gun owners, the rate of gun murders in 2010 was 0.3 per 100,000. So Chicago has a gun-homicide rate about 60 times Vermont’s, despite Vermonters being 150 times as likely to own a gun. To put that another way, in Chicago the ratio of the gun-homicide rate to the percentage of citizens who legally own guns is nine thousand times higher than it is in Vermont.

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DID you know that a funeral home director is now referred to by some as a “Life Celebration professional?” I feel sorry for people who die. It’s sad to leave this world on a wave of sentimentality and stilted joy.

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  AS the number of men infected with AIDS rises again, the World Health Organization contends that the epidemic, which is largely caused by immoral sexual practices, can be reduced by destigmatization of homosexuality, drug use and prostitution, as if there is a shred of sexual stigma left in the modern world. The WHO is now suggesting that all men who engage in homosexual activity take antiretroviral drugs. In other words, people should risk death to indulge illicit desires. No one has ever died from celibacy, millions die from illicit sexual activity. The WHO is anti-health. Antiretroviral drugs will never help, by the way, with the numerous other diseases and afflictions caused by anal intercourse, which causes more suffering than cigarette smoking and eating trans fats. The list of diseases found with extraordinary frequency among those who engage in anal intercourse, which traumatizes the fragile tissues of the anus and rectum and thus allows the entrance of pathogens into the blood stream, includes: Anal Cancer Chlamydia trachomatis Cryptosporidium Giardia lamblia Herpes simplex virus Human immunodeficiency virus Human papilloma virus Isospora belli Microsporidia Gonorrhea Viral hepatitis types B & C Syphilis Parasitic infections, and even typhoid, can be caused by homosexual sexual practices.  The rate of syphilis among homosexually-active men is three to four times that of the general population. According to John R. Diggs, Jr., M.D.: The consequences of homosexual activity have significantly altered the delivery of medical care to the population at-large.…

YOU would think Joan of Arc would be a favorite of feminists. After all, she was a military woman who dressed in men’s clothes and played a traditionally masculine leadership role. However, you are unlikely to find St. Joan in any women’s studies curriculum. Why? Solange Hertz explains why in this great article that appeared in the Remnant Newspaper last April. She writes:

Joan of Arc cut her hair short and wore men’s clothes. She particularly fancied beautiful armor and fine horses, which she rode astride, and was admired for her prowess with the lance. She led troops into battle, remaining in armor for six days running if necessary, and never faltered in her objective even after the enemy captured her. They tried her and executed her, not for war crimes, but for being a witch.

We might expect to see her commemorated on a postage stamp or a silver dollar along with other intrepid females who fought for women’s rights or otherwise beat men at their own game. But feminists seem wary of Joan, as if they didn’t quite trust her. Anyway, they don’t often mention her, at least in public, and they certainly don’t carry her banner in demonstrations. That shows a degree of political acumen on their part, for were they to call attention to her it would soon become painfully clear that she didn’t care a fig for equal rights, for either man or woman.

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STEVE KOGAN writes:

My wife and I have a three-acre rural property along a country road in Columbia County, New York. The sleepy Rip Van Winkle mood of the surrounding landscape is underscored by our nearby access to the other side of the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains just beyond, which is aptly named the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. According to Washington Irving’s tale, Rip is almost sleep-walking himself as he scrambles “unconsciously” up one of the highest peaks in the region, where he sees the river shimmering far below, with “lagging” ships in the windless air “sleeping on its glassy bosom.” He soon  enters a kind of mythical dreamland, where he encounters silent little shades of Henry Hudson’s crew, drinks their magical liquor, is knocked insensible for twenty years, and sleeps through the transformation of his domestic life and his colonial village and through the American Revolution itself.

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A READER writes:

I saw a new movie this week, Deliver Us from Evil, that has me writing to you for reasons I’ll get to in a minute.

Regarding the film’s quality, it is simply of its era: lots of 21st century, post-MTV visuals, audio, and violence. I won’t even be critical. This is multiplex filmmaking, plain and simple. And to be fair, there were some effectively creepy moments (e.g. a zookeeper possessed by Satan, captured on video, calmly, authoritatively bringing a lion under his charge).

But I’m not writing to tell you about the film’s aesthetics. It was the characterizations that struck me, for the worst of reasons.  First, we have two “buddy” cops—but this isn’t Adam-12 or Starsky and Hutch.  These officers are never in uniform (save for a brief training flashback) but never is it really established that they are “undercover” (unless I missed it).  And this is where it’s worth writing to you:  They look and talk exactly like, well, the very type of thugs I would expect them to chase.

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  LAST WEEK, five friends of the writer Lawrence Auster, who died in March of last year, gathered at his graveside at Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery in Springfield, Pennsylvania to mark the placing of a new tombstone at the site. We all continue to miss him, but it was a happy occasion to be there together and remember the man who so inspired us and truly was the greatest of friends. Afterward, we went to a restaurant nearby and talked about Mr. Auster's work and life. We agreed that we would all visit his grave together once a year. Thank you to the readers of View from the Right and to Auster family members who contributed to this beautiful monument made of Vermont granite. I wish to thank especially a reader from New Orleans who contributed $1,000.

AMERICAN plutocrats, in league with pharmaceutical interests, have been in the business of controlling the fertility of the lower orders for many decades now. The Rockefeller Foundation began to seriously work in this vein in the 1940s with its Population Council, at a time when the fecundity of Catholic families became a serious political concern and threat to the powers-that-be. Now Bill Gates is forging into new territory. According to Lifesitenews:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding the development of a contraceptive microchip that can be remotely controlled to release hormones that can act as abortifacients into a woman’s body for up to 16 years. Both the chip’s potential to take a life and the potential privacy concerns have drawn criticism.

The chip, which measures 20 x 20 x 7 millimeters, can be implanted under the skin of a woman’s buttocks, upper arm, or abdomen in 30 minutes. The device contains a 16-year reservoir of the drug levonorgestrel, releasing 30 micrograms a day – but the dosage can be altered by remote control, as well. (more…)

ROGER writes:

I tried looking up this word which appears on your site, but could not find a definition for it. What does it mean?

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BUCK writes:

It appears that science is now “good enough” to make the claim that children of same-sex “parents” are, in some ways, happier and healthier than children parented by their gender-role trapped biological mums and dads.

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  JEWEL writes: Here is  a beautiful essay by Anthony Esolen about friendship --- normal friendship between men, and how the culture of sodomy has basically ruined it for everyone: "A Requiem for Friendship"