Coffee Bowl Browsing

Man dies from caffeine overdose.  No, it wasn't me.  I don't think I can overdose on caffeine. . .been a grad student for too many years.

That non-partisan/non-political "Restoring Sanity" rally in D.C. yesterday featured placards showing GOP leaders with Hitler mustaches.  Hmmmmm. . .

Enraged mobs in Toronto frighten their "Betters" by electing a mayor who promises to undo years of elitist-leftist nannying.  Oh, the horror.

Geez. . .these people have no shame:  Alaska CBS news station is caught on tape conspiring to invent a "child molester scandal" for the GOP Senate candidate, Joe Miller.  These folks are dreading Tuesday.

A follow-up from the indomitable Breitbart:  Ouch! 

MoveOn.org lefty does the mature thing and apologizes for choking AZ Tea Party member.  Politics can get hot. . .and violent.  Good on him for acknowledging his mistake!  We need more of that in American politics.

Drag show sponsored by Jesuit university.  No comment. 

This is uber-creepy:  aliens and their ships appearing in religious art. . .from 400 yrs. ago!

Do demons exist?  As a matter for theologians, yes.  As a matter for philosophers. . .well, let's just say that the question is ambiguous and the answer more so.  We can say that demons exist and we can say that they are fallen angels. . .but it becomes a ginormous task to talk about demons in any way that makes sense outside theology.

How secure are those electronic voting machines?  We can put a man on the moon, but we struggle to find a secure, private way for citizens to vote. . .

Pro-aborts doing the Devil's work in Argentina.  Predictably, the national secular media do not cover the story.

From the pyramids to LOLcats:  on the venial uses of the brain

Scientists vs. engineers in the race to take over the world

Today's encouraging message!

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What ails ya? (A Request for Help)

Ideas for a third book have been bouncing around in my spacious head for some time.  One idea in particular has struck me as both useful and fun to do.

But I need your help. . .

In the combox, using a word or two, list off what it is that makes you spiritually uneasy, or gives you trouble in your life with Christ.

For example: anxiety, disbelief, grief, and timidity. 

I can come up with all sorts of things, but the book will be more useful if there's input from y'all!

Mille grazie. . .

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Halloween, 1989

In 1989, I lived in a large antebellum house with six other grad students.  We made Animal House look like Amish Sunday school.  This was how I dressed for that year's Halloween party.  NB.  This was about eight years before I became Catholic.

We called this costume, Felonious Vampire.

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Photographic proof that I used to be skinny!

This pic was taken in Changsha, China on Nov. 30, 1990. I was at the railway station waiting for a train to take me to Shanghai where I would catch a flight to the U.S. Over the approx. six months I was in China, I lost 50lbs. My parents picked me up at the airport in Memphis and our first stop was Mrs. Winner's Fried Chicken! Needless to say, that I found that 50lbs within a few months. Sigh...

Oh, and I had one haircut while I was there. . .yea, I know.

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The silence of the wolves. . .

30th Week OT (F)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Ss. Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Rules, regulations, laws are all attempts to express the most basic principles of a civilization. Traffic laws are meant to embody the need for everyone to drive safely. Food safety laws express a common concern that we are not killed by what we eat and drink. If a traffic law required a driver to speed through a school zone, or a food safety law required soda makers to dose their drinks with poison, we would all agree that these laws violate the fundamental principles they were created to express. In the Church, we have canon law, rubrics for liturgical celebrations, moral precepts, and dogmatic definitions—all designed to express the first commandment of Christ to his disciples: love God, neighbor, and self with the whole of one's body, mind, spirit, and strength. None of the Church's rules or regs mean a thing if they fail to help us follow the law of love. For example, Jesus confronts the scholars and Pharisees with a chance to condemn him when he heals a man on the Sabbath. When asked if he should break the Sabbath law by curing the man, the scholars and Pharisees remain silent. Rather than protest or argue, they simply keep their mouths shut, choosing instead to watch and wait to see what Jesus will do.

What does Jesus do? He responds to their uncaring silence with a miracle. He heals the man and asks, “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?” Again, the scholars and Pharisees remain silent, “unable to answer his question.” Why are they unable or unwilling to answer? It never seems to have been a problem for them in the past! If they were to admit that they would rescue their sons or their oxen on the Sabbath, then they would be admitting to the possibility that the Sabbath laws against work are not absolute. If they were to admit that they would leave their sons or their oxen to die, then they would be revealed to be cold-hearted legalists. The first choice makes them lawbreakers. The second choice makes them moral monsters. That they seem to understand these choices is a sign of hope that they not wholly lost to love, not wholly given over to the brutality of bureaucratic minutiae.

The freedom we enjoy as children of God is the freedom of those who know and understand that we were created by divine love and re-created by that love incarnated as one who walks among us as one of us. Christ came to us as the Word made flesh not the Law made flesh. He came to us as the first principle and culmination of his Father's plan for all creation: to bring us back to the One who is Love. No law or regulation or dogma can supersede its fundamental intent, its ultimate purpose. The fundamental intent, the ultimate purpose of Christ's life, death, and resurrection is our salvation. If we must heal on the Sabbath in order to give witness to God's love, then we heal on the Sabbath. We are slaves to divine love and obedience to this master is our salvation.

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

Mark Shea links to a great vid that explains how ObamaCare will fund abortions.

CCHD seems to be moving toward reforming itself.  "Policies and mechanisms" are only as strong as the people charged with enforcing them.  If the review panel is independent of the organization's bureaucracy and appointed by bishops, then maybe this will be a move in the right direction.  We'll see.

This column on next week's election pretty much sums up my own feelings on the state of American politics in 2010.   Extra points for referencing the Coming Zombie Apocalypse.

Wow. . .MN Democrats are putting their 19th century anti-Catholic Know-Nothingism on public display.  I hope MN Catholics who vote Democrat are paying attention to this.

Voting fraud already starting in NV. . .voters complain that their ballots were marked for Harry Reid even before they started voting. 

Dominican nuns [sic] to acquire the JPII Cultural Center in Detroit.  Hey, sisters!  If you decide to turn the place into a school, let me know. . .I may know a fellow Dominican who can teach for you.

Great article on why you shouldn't give a dime to UNICEF this Halloween.  Bonus points for using the title of a Flannery O'Connor short story as the post title.

Vid that appears to show a woman chatting on a cell phone. . .in 1928!  Prolly not.  No cell towers back then.  Obviously, she's using a communicator from her Temporal Displacement Pod.  Duh. (H/T:  fra. Auggie)

Remember that GOP congressional candidate that the MSM reported was go around calling for armed revolution against the gov't?  Well, not so much. 

Just in time for Halloween. . .A Catholic Field Guide to the Undead! One small quibble:  the post's author quotes C. S. Lewis. . .the idea that Lewis expresses in the quote is not a proper Catholic understanding of the human person.

Lesson for the day:  even evil people can get good grades, or something.

The difference btw how cats and dogs think about their owners.

I know what you mean! You can only milk a dead cow once.
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Thank God that's over. . .

Just got word. . .

I PASSED FRENCH!!!

Coffee Bowl Browsing

Do your consumer brand choices match your partisan politics?  The top ten brands for the Dems and the GOP.

Bees beat computers. . .shows you how far we still have to go on the road toward artificial intelligence.

The New Elites and the Tea Party. . .self-affirming ideological homogeneity among our "Betters."   For the N.E.'s diversity is only skin deep. 

The Tea Party is more of an "attitude movement" than a strictly partisan, political organization.

Those leaked WikiLeak documents from the DoD reveal that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. 

Back when universities were first invented (by the Church, btw!), professors were paid directly by their students.  If a prof wasn't doing his job, he had no students and no income.  Maybe we should consider returning to this model of higher education.  Oh, and there was no such as tenure!

Astute observation on the faux tolerance of NPR:  Conservative FOX had no problem with Williams working for liberal NPR; yet, liberal NPR couldn't tolerate him working for conservative FOX.  My own experience in academia and religious life bears this out:  liberals are very tolerant of those who believe exactly as they do.

Catholic bloggers "aim to purge dissenters" from the Church?!  Wow. . .I had no idea that bloggers had so much power. . .I feel lightheaded, kinda woozy and warm!  There's no need for Catholic bloggers to purge dissenters from the Church. . .Mother Nature is doing it for us.

Undercover vid of New Jersey teachers' union bosses partying hearty.  If this goes viral, be sure to put yourself near something large and solid. . .it's gonna get messy.  (NSFW:  strong language)

Excellent news out of Dallas:  Bishop Farrell getting high marks for turning the listless diocese around!  Vocations are up, thanks to Fr. Rudy Garcia, vocations director.  U.D.'s School of Ministry gets a mention. 

Middle East Synod turns into anti-Israel rally.  I had breakfast with a member of the synod yesterday morning.  He spent the whole time regaling me with stories about Israel's mistreatment of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.   The final document of the Synod contains condemnation of Israel's West Bank occupation.

Notre Dame post-B.O.:  drop of $120m in donations.

10 Annoying Habits of the Smartsphone User.  Only 10? 

Hey, whaddya know?  Jesus does save!

So, two Russian cops and a goat are waiting for the bus. . .

It's What's For Breakfast

Job application. . .I'd hire him just to keep things interesting.

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Mercy is hard

30th Week OT (M)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Ss. Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Our wounds are not healed by ideas or intentions alone. A gun shot wound really can't be healed by mercy as such. Neither can cancer, mental illness, nor addiction be treated by something as purely conceptual as love or forgiveness. Healing requires both intentions and acts. Imagine going into an emergency room with a broken arm and having the doctor stand over you while he intends to treat your arm! At some point, you're going to say, “Doc, are you going to do something?” How bizarre would it be for him to respond, “I am doing something. I'm thinking about healing you”? My guess is that you'd rather have his bad intention so long as he actually worked to fix your arm. In the abstract, mercy is easy. Doing merciful deeds is a little more complicated.

Jesus shows us how to be merciful by ridding a woman of a diseased spirit—an eighteen-year burden that has her bent over, making it impossible for her to stand erect. How exactly is this merciful? Relieving the sick of their diseases is in itself merciful. But Jesus goes one step further by healing her on the Sabbath. Rather than obeying a strict interpretation of the law that forbids work on the Sabbath, Jesus obeys the higher law of love and relieves the poor woman of her burden. Predictably, someone objects to this illegal act and calls Jesus out as a lawbreaker. Jesus' indignant retort to this charge humiliates his critic. He calls them hypocrites! Why shouldn’t this daughter of Abraham be set free on the Sabbath from Satan’s bondage? The gathered crowd “rejoiced at all the splendid deeds done by him.” And so they should: Jesus lifts from this crippled woman’s back not only the burden of a crippling spirit, but the burden of Law without Mercy as well. 

Paul picks up this teaching in his letter to the Ephesians. He writes, “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us. . .” This doesn't mean that we are to become lawless lovers of some abstract deity. It does mean that we love first and follow the law accordingly. If we can't love, we can't follow any law that's based on love. In much the same way that abstract notions like mercy, forgiveness, and charity become real only when enacted, our love for God must be embodied, made real through our whole humanity—word, thought, and deed and not simply limited to “good intentions.” Our psalmist this morning puts it succinctly: “Behave like God as his very dear children!”

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On St Dominic & the miracle of the cornbread

I've had a couple of requests for more info on the painting of St Dominic that appears above in the blog header.  I hate to admit it. . .but I just googled "Order of Preachers" and found it somewhere out there in the intertubes ether.  The "Please pass the cornbread" subtitle is just me being redneckish.

The Rev. Br. Lawrence Lew, OP of the English Province has a great post on the painting on his blog, Contemplata aliis Tradere.  Since I can't figure out how to link to this post, I will reproduce the story:

One of the most famous miracles involving St Dominic happened in the Refectory of San Sisto, which still exists, and the story is recounted in the Vitae Fratrum of the Order of Preachers and a painting of the event often adorns Dominican refectories:

"When the brethren were still living at the Church of San Sisto and formed a community of about one hundred, Blessed Dominic one day sent Brother John of Calabria and Brother Albert of Rome into the city to beg. From morning to noon, they went from house to house, but all in vain. As they were returning home without anything, they passed by the church of St. Anastasia where they met a woman who had a great love for the Order. Seeing that they had received no alms, she gave them one loaf of bread, saying, "I would hate to see you return empty-handed." They thanked her for the bread and continued on their journey home. Soon they were met by a handsome youth, who earnestly begged an alms of them. But they explained that having almost nothing for themselves, they could hardly give anything to him. As he continued to press them, they said to one another, "How far would a loaf of bread go with us? Let's give it to him for the love of God." No sooner had they given him the bread than he disappeared so quickly that they did not even know in what direction. When they reached the priory, the first one they met was Blessed Dominic who already knew, by a special revelation, all that had happened. He smiled and said, "I see you have nothing, my children," and they answered, "No, father." Then they hold him what they had received and of the beggar to whom they gave the bread. But he said to them, "It was an angel of the Lord. Nevertheless, the Lord will feed His servants. Let us go and pray." After they said a brief prayer in the church, he told them to summon the community for their meal. But they reminded him, "Holy Father, how can you tell them to come, when we have nothing to serve them?", and he answered, "The Lord will feed His servants." But when they continued to dilly-dally, he called Brother Roger, the procurator, and ordered him to call the brethren to the refectory, because the Lord would provide for His servants. So they set the tables and, when the signal was given, the community entered the refectory. After the blessing of the meal by Blessed Dominic, the brethren sat down and Brother Henry of Rome began to read. At his table Blessed Dominic joined his hands in prayer. Then the promise he had made through the Holy Spirit began to be fulfilled, for, in the middle of the refectory, there suddenly appeared two handsome youths from whose shoulders hung, in front and in back, two beautiful baskets filled with bread. Serving the youngest first, they began, one on the right and the other on the left, to distribute to each of the brethren one whole loaf of bread of marvelous appearance. When they reached Blessed Dominic and gave him a loaf, they bowed and disappeared. No one to this day knows whence they came or where they went. Then Blessed Dominic said to the brethren, "Come, brethren, eat the bread which the Lord has sent you."

Then he told the brethren who were serving to get some wine for the brethren. But they answered, "Holy father, there is no wine." Then filled with a prophetic spirit, Blessed Dominic told them to go to the wine-cask and draw off the wine the Lord has put there. They went and found the cask filled to the top with wine. Drawing some off, they served it to the brethren. And Blessed Dominic said, "Come, brethren, drink the wine which the Lord has sent." Thus they ate and drank as much as they needed that day and the next and the day after. When the meal was over, he ordered that all the unused bread and wine be given to the poor, because he did not want anything to remain in the house. But for those three days he sent no one out to beg, because the Lord was supplying them with bread and wine from heaven in abundance. Later the blessed father gave the brethren a beautiful sermon exhorting them never to lose their trust in God's providence, even in the direst need.

Later on, Brother Tancred, prior of the brethren, Brothers Odo and Henry of Rome, Brother Lawrence of England, Brother Gaudio, Brother John of Rome, and many others described this famous miracle to Sister Cecilia, who was living in the convent of St. Mary in Tempulo, and to other nuns. To them they gave some of the bread and wine, which they kept for many years as relics."

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Former NPR news analysis, Juan Williams comments on his firing. But don't worry about Juan; he ain't hurtin'.  Oh, and it's OK to fire Juan b/c he was a "lawn jockey" for FOXNews. Oh, and there's a move afoot to defund NPR.  'Bout time too.

So, if Juan gets fired for speaking his mind as a news analysis, why didn't NPR fire Nina Totenberg for saying that God's justice could mean that Jesse Helms will get AIDS.

Wow. . .great political ad.  A Chinese professor lectures on the fall of great empires, including the USA.

League of Women Voters debate moderator upset that the audience "forced" her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  Very telling.

Greed eyed monster:  more reasons for women not to take The Pill.

New seminary for the Archdiocese of Washington!  Hey, I wonder if they could use a slightly used but still energetic English/philosophy/theology professor. . .hmmmmmm?

The "Muslim Dances on High Altar" vid has been making the rounds of late.  No doubt:  dancing on an altar is not something we can dismiss as a prank; however, it appears that the man is mentally unstable.  If so, then he can't properly be called a blasphemer. 

WaPo story confirms that Eric Holder's DoJ is refusing to pursue voting rights violations committed against white voters.  So much for a "post-racial" administration.

Some advice for those thinking about a graduate degree in theology.  Best advice:  don't let the shininess of a faculty star lure you into a blackhole.  Better advice.

With my luck, this will happen at my funeral.

Cute vid. . .caution:  likely to cause diabetes.

Movie cliches. . .yup, that's about right.

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On conscience and the magisterium

The relationship between an individual's conscience and the authority of the magisterium is often easily confused and intentionally distorted.   

Let's start with a definition:  "Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed. In all he says and does, man is obliged to follow faithfully what he knows to be just and right. It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law. . ."(CCC, no. 1778).

Conscience "perceives and recognizes" moral truth.  Contemporary Catholics often seem to believe that conscience is the ability to choose freely among available moral options.  So long as I preface my choices with something like, "In good conscience, I believe. . .," I am safeguarded from error.  This is false.  Conscience is not the ability to magically turn an evil choice into a good choice.  Conscience is what helps us to perceive the Good and recognize that Good in making moral choices.

When I walk into a bookstore, I perceive and recognize items that we call books.  I do not walk into a bookstore and choose to perceive the books as squirrels and recognize them as squirrels.  If I do this, I am in error.  Announcing my erroneous judgment about the books with, "In good conscience, I perceive and recognize this collection of paper and cloth bound pages of printed material as squirrels," does not magically transform the books into squirrels.  

Catholic teaching holds that the morality of human acts is as real as the books in a bookshop.  Calling the intrinsically morally evil act of abortion "good" is the same error you make when you call a book a squirrel.*  Conscience empowers you to perceive and recognize abortion as evil.  If you do not perceive and recognize abortion as evil, then you are either ignorant and need to be instructed, or your conscience has been twisted into folly by sin and you need both instruction and confession.

The Church's role in conscience formation is to present the truth of the faith.  Ideally, a Catholic will immediately perceive and recognize the truth and act accordingly.  But because we have been mislead for a generation or two about the nature of conscience, many Catholics fail to perceive and recognize moral truth when they see it.  Basically, we have been told for decades now that conscience makes truth, or that conscience assigns truth value to moral acts according to subjective, private standards of judgment.  This is how we end up with pro-abortion Catholics, pro-same sex "marriage" Catholics, pro-torture Catholics, pro-women's "ordination" Catholics, ad. nau.  These Catholics have falsely perceived and falsely recognized moral truth and misused "conscience" as a defense of their errors.

To repeat:  conscience perceives and recognizes truth; it does NOT create truth. 

Tom Krietzberg at Disputations has a very good post on how Aquinas' thoughts on conscience have been misunderstood and misused to push the Free Choice notion of conscience.

*Of course, the eternal consequences of these two errors are not the same.

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Wards of the French Nanny State throw violent temper tantrums.  Poor things are being told that they have to work until they are 62!  Evil, evil Nanny State.  And now, they don't even get all those tourist dollars/euros/pounds/sheckels.  That should help the economy.

Speaking of tantrums. . .Pelosi's flying monkeys in the House are dousing any fantasy she may have had about being Speaker again.

The Anchoress on "The Credentialed Gentry and the Unpersuaded Yahoo."  This puts me in a terrible bind.  I'm a member of both the credentialed gentry AND an unpersuaded yahoo.  Oops.  I'm pretty sure the other members of the CredGen would kick me out if they could.

Excellent article on how materialists fundamentally misunderstand the notion of free will.  Take time to read the whole thing.

Damien Thompson wonders:  "Is this the start of a civil war in the Church of England?" 

Now we're talkin'!  Catholic pub opens in Rome

WaPo and the AP completely rewrite their O'Donnell Church and State story w/o issuing a correcction.  Predictably, the lefties wanted to hear her deny that there is a "wall between church and state," so when she asked her opponent if such a thing is found in the 1st Amendment, they jumped on her like a pack of rabid Credentialed Gentry hunting a wounded Yahoo. 

Prof. Jacobson fisks the original story for all he's worth.  Also, how did that wall btw church and state get there in the first place?  Interesting back story that includes the KKK!

More race-hustling from the NAACP.  BTW, the link has a list of links to all the black GOP and Tea Party backed candidates running for office in the mid-term elections.  For a bunch of racists they should do have a lot of black folks on their side.

Explaining what happened to Vatican Two btw 1965-85.  Good article.  In seminary we were told over and over again that the published documents were products of a liberal majority that (mistakenly) felt the need to compromise with reactionary factions.  Therefore, any "traditional language" could be dismissed b/c it was in the document only as a way of appeasing the ecclesial neanderthals.  Fortunately, none of us bought this ruse. . .but we kept our mouths shut just in case speaking up against the prof turned into a "formation issue."

Two kinds of human beings. . .which one are you?

Find a genie in a bottle?  Be careful what you wish for. . .

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Making known the inscrutable riches of Christ

29th Week OT (Wed)

Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP

Ss. Domenico e Sisto, Roma

Jesus tells his disciples that they must be prepared for his unexpected return. That's just a little strange. How do you prepare for an unexpected return? There is only one way: always be prepared! You might think that Jesus is warning us that he intends to pop out from behind the sofa while we party and yell, “Gotcha!” The threat of his sudden appearance is supposed to keep us on our toes, ever vigilant against a surprise inspection from Big Daddy in the sky. However, the parable he tells is more about faithful stewardship than it is about being constantly on guard for surprises. Think of it this way: you can be a faithful servant b/c you are scared of getting caught being unfaithful, or you can be a faithful servant b/c you ARE a faithful servant. This is the difference between being stunted in your spiritual growth and being spiritually mature. Peter asks Jesus if his initial warning is meant for the disciples alone or for everyone. Jesus answers with a parable about stewardship. As is usually the case with parables, the answer is not black and white. Yes, stewards are the ones left in charge of the household, so it's pretty clear that Jesus is talking to those he will leave behind to oversee his Church. However, in baptism, each of us is made a steward of God's grace for the benefit of everyone else. So, is the initial warning to always be prepared meant for the disciples or everyone else? The answer is both. All of us must always be prepared for the Master's return. In fact, we are charged with fulfilling the duties of the stewards of God's grace as if the Master never left us. The spiritually immature Christian await his return with some measure of fear, some sense of foreboding that a severe beating is on the way. The spiritually mature Christian knows that the Master never left, that he is with us always and all we do in his name is done in his presence. As sinners we have been entrusted with more than deserve. Having been made stewards of God's grace we are entrusted with the responsibility of preaching “the inscrutable riches of Christ. . .so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the Church to the principalities and authorities in the heavens.” No small task! But not a burden either if we do our work in the knowledge that Christ is always with us, always abiding in the Body as our daily bread, the hour to hour source of all that is good.

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Coffee Bowl Browsing

The problem of evil as presented on a few popular TV shows.  Confession:  I'm a big fan of all things vampirish in the movies and on TV.  The Good vs. Evil plot lines resonant with my Catholic soul!

And speaking of evil. . .there are only six Catholic priests in the U.S. who perform exorcisms?

Handy summary and outline of the VC2 document, Gaudium et spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World).

The VFW fires its PAC board after the board endorsed Pelosi, Reed, and Boxer. 

Hypocrisy Alert:  Dems take twice as much foreign money as the GOP.  Of course, the Dem's hypocrisy here doesn't absolve the GOP.

CA firefighters who were forced to participate in a "gay pride" parade win their harassment case on appeal.  The decision of the appeals panel was unanimous. 

If this doesn't make you laugh. . .well, check your pulse.

Peace in our time!

A new terrorist threat:  Al-Gebra.  Bomb those @#$% back to the Roman numeral days!


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