Speaking of souvenirs–as I like to do–while the Presbyterian Church (USA) is discussing (arguing) homosexuality at their meeting in San Jose, they are making great inroads against the Catholic Church. According to the omnipresent Gary Stern of the Westchester Journal News, the PCUSA is displaying a John Calvin bobblehead in the exhibit hall. That is…

News out of Rome is that the Vatican has made a papal-approved offer to the right-wing Traditionalist schismatics of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), the progeny of the late Vatican II-hating Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. When I heard of this yesterday from a Roman friend, I wondered if it were true. But it turns…

There is so much to chew over in the latest batch of data from the Pew Forum’s prodigious Religious Landscape Survey, but combine the Pew’s numbers on Catholic party affiliation with a lesser-noted new survey from Georgetown’s CARA institute, and the most important and eye-popping shift of all jumps right out: Namely, that the Republican…

The potty-mouthed, acid-tongued, but often hilarious comedian George Carlin has died, and with him another product of a bygone Catholic culture–the parochial school “class clown” (as he styled himself) who rebelled against all those strictures but got his revenge by making a fortune off the material. Little notice in the earlier obits I’ve seen about…

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