The narrow defeat of the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case has sent its supporters into ecstases of rage and hate that have to be seen to be believed, and that in some cases can only be described as murderous. I am glad I don't live in the USA. But this fury, that bewilders many conservatives and independents, does not bewilder me. The ( Read more... )

The drift away from normative lifelong monogamous marriage seems to be as old as the human race. That seems to me to be what Our Lord meant when He said: "Moses told you so [allowing divorce] because of the hardness of your hearts, but from the beginning it was not so." Jesus had asked "What did Moses teach you [about marriage]?" And he had been ( Read more... )

...is not altogether without precedent. Apart from the case of Celestine VI, Pius XII wrote and signed, but left undated, an act of resignation, to be activated in case the Nazis kidnapped him. That is to say that it is not completely out of the order of things. And the fact that people live longer now than they ever did before means that sooner or ( Read more... )

The history of the Western Church begins with the Pope recognized as the ultimate court of appeal. Kings were crowned by bishops and therefore could, in extreme cases, be uncrowned (as Pope Innocent did to King John Lackland, and Gregory VII to Emperor Henry). But in the late middle ages, the kings - beginning with the king of France - began to ( Read more... )

...THE ENTS ARE GOING TO WAKE UP, AND FIND THAT THEY ARE STRONG.

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The ending of World War Two engulfed all countries, victor and neutral, into a tide of horror. Even the Soviet Union, whose government had little to learn from Nazism at its worst, found it easy to show, indeed to feel, horror at what its troops discovered in the early months of 1945 in dozens of camps from Majdanek to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. ( Read more... )

This article begins with a stunning statistic.( Read more... )

Nobody seems to have noticed the parallel; because, I suppose, not many historians today write from a Catholic viewpoint. But in 1798, two Catholic priests led two great popular insurrections on the two sides of the war then raging between a French Revolution not yet quite hijacked by a Corsican adventurer, and a reactionary Europe dedicated to ( Read more... )

Don't waste your time trying to defend the Church. There is no point: the haters don't want to be set straight - it is too convenient to them to recycle the filth of the New Jerk Lines and its repulsive accomplices. If anyone comes at you with the kind of excrement that has been coming through the wrong orifice of media persons in their jolly ( Read more... )

The Editrix, a two-fisted, pugnacious, opinionated blogger from Germany whom I could almost make an honorary Italian for her stubborn individuality - and with whom I have had some vigorous disagreements - published on one of her blogs an article so important that I asked her permission to republish it whole. Here it is:

Nine Million Women or: No ( Read more... )