JAMES H. writes:

Alan’s missive on his visit to an old Catholic cemetery in St. Louis reminded me of my own visit to a St. Louis graveyard.

A few weeks ago, my sister and I visited Holy Trinity Church in North St. Louis, St. Nicholas Church in South St. Louis and Calvary Cemetery. My paternal great-great-great uncle was from a small town near Paderborn, Germany and was Rector at Holy Trinity when he died in 1907. Paderborn, Germany is the same town my maternal great-great-grandmother was from as well and only 20 miles from Rheder, Germany where her husband was born. Small world!

My uncle is buried in Calvary Cemetery in North St. Louis – truly one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever visited.

On our visit, I could not help being struck by the many beautiful churches in North and South St. Louis, each and every one a testament to the faith-filled men and women who built these communities. Now these same “communities” have been largely destroyed. (more…)

A LIBERAL woman describes her experience with a man in the women's room at Disneyland.

FROM Lifesite News: Joseph Sciambra, who participated in the “gay” subculture in his youth as a porn actor and later abandoned the lifestyle after returning to the Catholic faith, has been working for years to bring about a reform of such ["gay-friendly"] parishes and programs, and to alert the public about the harm being done to Catholics who suffer from “same-sex attraction.” However, the bishops and diocesan administrations consistently ignore him and others who complain. “For the most part, my attempts at instigating a dialogue or discourse with certain bishops in terms of sharing my experiences about gay-affirmative parishes and ministries has failed,” Sciambra told LifeSiteNews. “In some cases, it has taken years to elicit a single response. Then they have recommended patience.” Patience, however, is difficult for Sciambra, who watched dozens of friends die as a result of their homosexual lifestyle. “As someone who lost friends to AIDS, partially because they were willfully deceived by priests who recommended that they remain in the ‘gay’ lifestyle, watching as these parishes and ministries continue to confuse and mislead others, sometimes for over 30 years, it’s difficult to remain patiently silent,” Sciambra told LifeSiteNews. “I tend to look at it this way: When a doctor is treating someone suffering from a leg infected by gangrene, does the doctor advise patience, or does he act swiftly and decisively in order to save the person?  Because time is of the essence.”

SOME free polemic from The Anti-New York Times: [I]f Twitterer-In-Chief's juvenile cyber-blurbs are any indication, the road ahead may be very rocky.  “North Korea is behaving very badly,”he tweeted. Then added, “They have been ‘playing’ the United States for years. China has done little to help!” And who the frickety-frack is Orange Man [Trump] -- that self-professed champion of "national sovereignty" -- to lecture North Korea and China on what are purely their own domestic affairs? Why should North Korea disarm itself? How did that work out for Qaddafi of Libya? How does this aggressive posture serve the interests of the "America First" ideal that OM campaigned on and got elected with? And if these threats against Iran, North Korea, and, though subtly, China do not serve the American people, then who does benefit?

THIS presentation by Mike Maloney helps explain why families are not able to survive on one income anymore. Even those who have no personal debt are paying for massive, systematized indebtedness through inflation and taxes. Feminism, by making two-income families glamorous, puts a romantic gloss on debt bondage and a greater disparity in wealth.

Debt bondage relies on monetary illiteracy.

In the 1920s, the Social Credit movement emerged to address this problem. Social Credit missionaries, based in Quebec, went from door to door trying to educate people about the monetary system. Some still do as the St. Michael’s Pilgrims. One of social credit’s proponents Louis Even, author of In This Age of Plenty, wrote this description of the movements goals: (more…)

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

I have just re-read, as I do each year, one of the greatest novels of the last century and perhaps one that speaks more powerfully than any other to traditional Catholics about what really lays at the heart of our faith and what we have a right to expect from our shepherds. I speak of Graham Greene’s masterpiece: The Power and the Glory (1939).

The novel is a very rich one, interweaving many important themes relevant to both religious faith and the human condition which would require a book-length essay to do justice to it. Very broadly it is the story of the alcoholic “whisky priest” hunted for a number of years by the fiercely-anti Catholic government of a Mexican state that has confiscated Church property, outlawed the Mass and declared all priests to be, prima facie, traitors subject to execution upon capture. (more…)

ALAN writes:

One day more than ten years ago I was walking through an old Catholic cemetery in St. Louis.  I was in a frame of mind to do that because I knew that that cemetery is the final resting place for twenty-five people in my family and extended family.  I was taken there when my grandmother died in 1957, but I have no concrete memories from that day.

At its entrance is a two-story chapel mausoleum.  I walked into the building and read some of the names on the wall.  In one corner there was a name just above eye level.  It read “Stephanie Crane” and there was a small photograph of an attractive young woman with dark hair.  But what caught my attention were the years of her life: 1949-2002.  It struck me instantly:  She and I were contemporaries.  We were the same age.  She had been five weeks younger.  Yet there was her name in plain sight on that wall—and here was I, still walking around.  She died at age 52.  That moment had the effect of “concentrating the mind,” although my mind had already been concentrated by the loss of my parents in successive years.  What it meant to me was:  It is later than you think. (more…)

JAMES N. writes:

Another teacher-student sex story, of the sort that is depressingly familiar – although the running away is still rather uncommon. But what caught my attention was the quote far down in the article from “a family source:”  “It’s so hard to understand what would bring someone to do these kinds of things. I don’t understand how this is real life,” the source says.

But, of course, it’s EASY to understand what would bring someone (a man) to seek relations with a comely young woman, if society, and this family, knew anything about male sexuality, and someone who “doesn’t understand how this is real life” knows nothing about real life.

People who DID know about real life made sure that relations between the sexes were subject to stringent legal regulation, and strong social sanctions. (more…)

St. Patrick’s Day

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of His love!
All praise to the shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the heart of the Saviour above!
For hundreds of years, in smiles and in tears,
Our Saint has been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone, Saint Patrick alone,
He hath been to us light when earth’s lights were all set,
For the glories of Faith they can never decay;
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
In the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick’s Day. (more…)

CHARLES CARLSON, a Baptist deacon who is "pro-peace and pro-life," was recently interviewed by Judith Sharpe of In the Spirit of Chartres about his work against Christian Zionism. Carlson is part of the organization We Hold These Truths. The interview is available this month to listeners for free. I am a big fan of Mrs. Sharpe's interviews.  

It is one thing to acknowledge that racial and cultural diversity exists, that it poses challenges to any social order, and that we must deal with it as best we can. It is quite another thing to claim that diversity is the highest good, to be pursued as an end in itself. The former position leads to a realistic response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves; the latter to a quest for utopia that must involve the total reconstruction of the existing society.

— Lawrence Auster, Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism (more…)

TECHNICAL wizardry and sexual decadence are made for each other. "Gay" is a particularly inapt misnomer for a way of life marked by sin, loneliness, and self-disgust, not to mention disease and early death. --- Joseph Sobran

THE Anti-New York Times suggests alternatives to the Obamacare Lite proposal supported by Congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration:

1. Limit malpractice lawsuits against doctors and hospitals by establishing award limits. Cap lawyer fees at 10% and place the burden of proof on the plaintiff. …

2. Give doctors and hospitals a partial or full income-tax / corporate credit for treating those too poor to afford health insurance. (more…)

  HAIL Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. (Image courtesy of It's About Time)  

  THE Occupied Vatican recently celebrated the Communist holiday, International Women's Day.

  CHRISTOPHER Bollyn, author of Solving 9/11: The Deception that Changed the World, gave this recent talk in Jacksonville, Florida.

RON PAUL writes in his weekly column: President Trump’s escalation in Syria is doomed to failure. He is being drawn into a quagmire by the neocons that will destroy scores of lives, cost us a fortune, and may well ruin his presidency. He must de-escalate immediately before it is too late. The president has also escalated military involvement in Yemen. Read more here. Daniel McAdams writes: [A]lthough the US escalation in Yemen is sold back home as another aggressive front in the war against al-Qaeda, in fact US operations in Yemen are actually helping al-Qaeda as well as its chief sponsor, Saudi Arabia.

DAN R. writes:

Does the White House spokeswoman and married daughter of the strong social conservative Mike Huckabee really prefer to be called Ms. Sanders (example within link), as per the New York Times stylebook? Seemingly a small matter, and no doubt a complaint “a day late,” the use of the thoroughly modern term to the exclusion of the traditional Mrs. and Miss has become ubiquitous in mainstream media. It continues to rankle each time I notice it. In the case of the Times it is an annoyingly obvious measure of their dedication to political correctness. In the bigger picture it demeans and almost unconsciously alters the status of marriage, contributing to the overall rot. Taking it to the absurd, the worst-case example I can recall is in the credits of a movie remake, where the 14-year-old star is referred to in one of the credits as “Ms.” I think it’s safe to call it Gloria Steinem’s greatest “accomplishment.” (more…)