JOHN CARPAY: Since early 2020, the majority of religious leaders around the world have supported lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccination passports, and other coercive measures that violated the freedom, prosperity, and well-being of millions of citizens. As just one prominent example, in August of 2021 Pope Francis and other bishops praised the new Covid vaccine as “safe and effective.” Vatican City pressured all [...]
Interim Staff In a late-January interview with the Associated Press in January, Pope Francis said that homosexuality should not be criminalized. Meanwhile, on Feb. 9, the governing body of the Church of England voted to bless same-sex couples while leaving unchanged the Church’s definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Pope Francis told AP reporters on Jan. 25, that, [...]
Paul Tuns: Pope emeritus Benedict XVI died on Dec. 31 at the Vatican, and while most legacy media coverage focused on his history-making retirement in 2013, only eight years into his pontificate, and his role in the liturgical conflicts within the Catholic Church after Vatican II, he also left a legacy calling for universal respect and protection of human life. As an [...]
Interim Staff: Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) trustee Mike Del Grande lost an Ontario Superior Court decision in his petition to quash sanctions imposed on him by the majority of the elected school board for using rhetoric supposedly “offensive” to LGBTQ activists and students in his defense of Catholic sexual and gender teaching. In 2019 and 2020, Del Grande opposed a [...]
Rory Leishman It is astonishing that even today so many prominent advocates of legalized abortion still think the point at which human life begins is a matter of philosophical debate and religious dogma rather than settled science. In an article entitled “Atheists and the Pro-Life Movement,” Mary FioRito of the Ethics and Public Policy Center cites the example of Justice Sonia Sotomayor [...]
Donald De Marco He was born in a stable to poor parents. There were no nurses or doctors in attendance, but some animals and a few nearby shepherds. His home would be the small town of Nazareth about which it was said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” This is a most unpromising beginning of a revolution. And yet, despite all its unpromising circumstances, it [...]
Harley Price It tells you something about the times that when you Google “Jesus Christ” one of the first suggestions that pops up in the auto-fill menu is “Jesus Christ Superstar.” As a ubiquitous phenomenon of popular modern culture, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical has been one of the most effective forces for the infantilization of the Western mind of the [...]
Paul Tuns Pope Francis recently named six new members to the Pontifical Academy for Life for five-year terms, including five who oppose the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion and contraception: economist Mariana Mazzucato, former Botswana health minister Sheila Dinotshe Tlou, Monsignor Phillipe Bordeyne, Father Humberto Miguel Yáñez, and bioethics professor Roberto Dell’Oro Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Pope John Paul II founded the Academy [...]
Chileans reject pro-abortion constitution On Sept. 4, voters in Chile rejected a new constitution that would have legalized abortion-on-demand and strip away unborn babies’ right to life. In a national binding referendum, more than six in ten voters voted against a new “progressive” constitution (38 per cent in favour, 62 per cent against) that was part of socialist President Gabriel Boric’s sweeping [...]
A Modern Global History: Andrei Znamenski (Lexington Books, $176 hc, $61 pb, 451 pages) Andrei Znamenski writes in the introduction to Socialism as a Secular Creed, “When I embarked on this project of galloping through the 150 years of socialism’s history I never suspected that it would be such an exciting and intellectually challenging venture.” In more than 400 pages, he provides [...]
The Greater Reset: Reclaiming Personal Sovereignty Under Natural Law Michael D. Greany and Dawn K. Brohawn (Tan, $30, 383 pages): For 40 years the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab has pushed a globalist agenda of stakeholder capitalism which would make companies answerable not to their shareholders but a global elite that share a centralizing worldview of welfare statism and monopoly capitalism. The [...]
Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk (Oxford, $33, 148 pages) Sociologists Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk distill American research based on 215 in-depth personal interviews and two surveys of a nationally representative sample of parents to determine what it takes for religious parents to inculcate their children in their [...]
Oswald Clark: On May 20, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone wrote to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, whose congressional district is in the prelate’s archdiocese, to inform her that as a pro-abortion politician she can no longer present herself for Holy Communion when she is in San Francisco. He wrote that the Roman Catholic Church has been “clear and [...]
Interim Staff: On May 10, the Bloc Québecois put forward a motion to eliminate the daily morning prayer that begins the House of Commons proceedings. It was defeated the next day in a 266-56 vote, with Conservative and Liberal MPs voting against the motion, while the Bloc and majority of NDP MPs voting to support it. According to the House of Commons [...]
Paul Tuns On June 17, 73 per cent of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) voted during their annual spring meeting to draft a position paper on the “meaning of the Eucharist,” with an eye to reiterating the Church’s position that politicians who dissent from key moral teachings such as abortion should not present themselves to receive Holy Communion during Mass. [...]