CARDINAL TIMOTHY DOLAN’s appearance Friday at Fordham University with the comedian Stephen Colbert was one more public humiliation of the Church by the grovelingly buffoonish Archbishop of New York. You know it was bad when the New York Times describes the event as “the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.”

Colbert, who calls himself Catholic, said to the Cardinal at one point: “So many Christian leaders spread hatred, especially of homosexuals. How can you maintain your joy?”

According to the Times,“Cardinal Dolan responded with two meandering anecdotes — one about having met this week with Muslim leaders, and another about encountering demonstrators outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

Laurie Goldstein reports, “Mr. Colbert’s response was quick and unequivocal. ‘If someone spreads hate,’ he said, ‘then they’re not your religious leader.'”

At the Remnant, Christopher A Ferrara has a blistering appraisal of the Cardinal’s invitation to Barack Obama to the Al Smith Dinner on Oct. 18. The invitation, he writes, “demonstrates the total surrender of the Catholic Church to the Zeitgeist and the powers that be in America.”

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Brad C. writes:

No reference to Cardinal Dolan is complete without an accompanying photo of the “Cheesehead” vestments.

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DANIEL S. writes:

Ufology has long been a favorite topic of mine. In my teenager years I had a near obsession with the subject, devouring every book and TV documentary I could find on UFOs, abductions, and conspiracy theories. I read everything from Whitley Strieber’s famous book Communion to William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (in which he offers the theory of an alien takeover of Earth in league with the Illuminati, which he later rejected declaring the notion of an alien takeover a false flag for the New World Order). In my own time I have witnessed UFOs, though I always shied away from specifically defining what I had seen, not knowing whether I had seen something natural or supernatural in the night sky.

In recent years I had left the topic on the back burner of my spiritual and intellectual pursuits, but a year or so back had my interest renewed after reading Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Father Seraphim Rose and The System of the Antichrist by Charles Upton, a disciple of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon. (more…)

ROBERT FROST’S 1916 poem “Out, Out” is the sad and moving story of the death of a farm boy. It was based on a real life occurrence. According to Jay Parini’s biography, Robert Frost, A Life, the following obituary appeared in the Littleton Courier on March 31, 1910. The boy was a neighbor of Frost’s in New Hampshire:

Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, one of the twin sons of Michael G. and Margaret Fitzgerald of Bethlehem, died at his home Thursday afternoon, March 24, as a result of an accident by which one of his hands was badly hurt in a sawing machine. The young man was assisting in sawing up some wood in his own dooryard with a sawing machine and accidentally hit the loose pulley, causing the saw to descend upon his hand, cutting and lacerating it badly. Raymond was taken into the house and a physician was immediately summoned, but he died very suddenly from the effects of shock, which produced heart failure.

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ALEXANDRA writes:

After enjoying your blog for some time and learning a great deal from you and your readers and commenters, I am pleased to have relevant experience to share with regard to the recent entry on divorced spouses in the obituaries.  I worked at a daily newspaper in a medium-sized city (population 175,000) for five years.  During most of that time, I worked the obituary desk.

About a quarter of the time, a family member would prepare something. (more…)

SUSAN writes:

I just came across the short book — pamphlet really — entitled Widow With a Husband: An Alzheimer’s Experience  (2008) by Kathleen Ryan. The author was married to George Blaufuss, Jr. for nineteen years, from 1988 until his death at age ninety-two in 2007. He was  first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1999.

The obituary for Mr. Blaufuss in the Napa Register mentions that he was predeceased by a daughter, Gail, and survived by a son, George Blaufuss III, along with two step-sons, three step-daughters, and their various descendants.  (more…)

  I HAVE quite a few comments from readers on recent threads. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get to them yet. I hope to post them by this afternoon.