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Pontifications

What will Obama do Monday morning when he announces a lifting of the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research? He could add some conditions, which would perhaps mitigate some of the blow-back from the Christian (not Mormon–they hold that it’s not human until implantation) right, though I doubt it. Father Tom Reese,…

That’s the upshot of a story that is roiling Brazil, as a nine-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather and became pregnant with twins received an abortion. There are conflicting reports as to whether the girl was excommunicated–this Irish Times story indicates the ordinary, Archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho of Olinda and Recife, says she was not,…

The latest neuroscientific study (such research may be the economy’s lone growth industry) indicates that religious faith can help people chill when things go wrong–and that they will go wrong is one of life’s few guarantees these days. According to this story in Canada’s National Post: “These results suggest that religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and…

An article in the Arkansas Catholic, the paper of the Diocese of Little Rock, talks to Scripture scholars and others on why we fast and what we gain from the practice. It is called “Fasting out of love: God doesn’t want a fulfilled obligation; he wants our hearts.” And another article reports on how Lenten observances are growing…

I gave a parish talk last night on conversion, and what it means–to me as a convert, to us as Catholics (especially during Lent), to the modern world, and what it meant to the first Christians of Jesus’ day. Conversion means many things, and is interconnected with repentance, sanctification, justification, and salvation. As regards salvation,…

The Holy See doesn’t seem to be getting its rochet in a twist–yet–over Kathleen Sebelius. Religion News Service’s man in Rome, Francis X. Rocca, writes in an RNS blog post titled “Vatican [heart] Obama?” that items in L’Osservatore Romano on consecutive days “suggest that the Holy See is sending friendly signals to the Obama White…

Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann devotes his weekly column to Obama’s choice of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a pro-choice Catholic, to be secretary of Health and Human Services. The column pretty well summarizes his disappointment and the history of their differences, leading up to his calling on her to refrain from taking communion. A spikier…

David P. Goldman says we need to procreate ourselves back to prosperity. At First Things, Goldman chides Republicans for all the failed and weak-kneed responses to the outrage that is (in his view) the Obama economic program. The cause of the crisis was not fiscal recklessness, but the demographic dip. Hence: The first thing that…

Well, only if you’re not a real conservative…For everyone else, it’s a bit like watching–well Comedy Central. The Rush-Steele matchup (Rush by TKO in the first, if you were out getting a snack) is the driving narrative, thanks also to Rush’s Orson Welles imitation at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. And yes, Jon Stewart…

Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles has announced that Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying bishop of the right-wing SSPX sect, is “hereby banned from entering any Catholic church, school or other facility, until he and his group comply fully and unequivocally with the Vatican’s directives regarding the Holocaust.” I believe that makes Cardinal Mahony the first bishop…
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