The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord celebrated on February 2 2009 comes at just the right time this year a time when we ought even more to reflect on the Jewishness of Jesus Fr James Martin noted in the In All Things blog yesterday a document posted on the website of the Society of St

nbsp nbsp nbsp nbsp Today s blog is brought to you by the letter R nbsp nbsp nbsp The state department I work for the CDC or California Department of Corrections in 2005 had the letter R added to its acronym making it the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation It

The ongoing debate over Pope Benedict s decision to lift the ban of excommunication on four bishop-members of the Society of St Pius X has been split into to general discussions First the currently nbsp more explosive issue of the reception of Bishop Williamson into nbsp full communion with

They entered Capharnaum on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee that is Jesus and his disciples He taught on the Sabbath in the synagogue he is the only teacher in his group The people in the synagogue were astounded by Jesus teaching because he was teaching with authority i e

It is nbsp distressing to find that The New Republic a magazine for which I have written over the years has given Damon Linker the author of Theocons a blog on their website I was even more distressed to find what I can only characterize as bigotry in one of his first postings Linker writes ab

Robert Mickens the Rome correspondent for the London Tablet has a lengthy article on the SSPX saga in this week s Tablet here nbsp He also sent us this much more nbsp personal reflection which he has allowed us to post here Pope Benedict XVI said at his general audience on Wednesday that the

Estupido What else to call GOP opposition in the Senate to the State Children rsquo s Health Insurance Program SCHIP expanding the program to include 4 million more children all of it funded by an always advisable raise in the federal cigarette tax The vote was 66-32 largely along party lines

Like many other concerned citizens who are not specialists in climatology I have regularly looked for some helpful keys to understand and assess the many controverted claims about global warming How fast is it happening How urgent is it that we act now At what level of parts per million can we t

President Obama rsquo s stimulus proposal failed to garner a single Republican vote in the House yesterday Their objections were many but were they legitimate On balance no but neither were the defenders of the bill examples of reasonableness Objection 1 This bill contains pork barrel spending

Please forgive the shameless plug but because I rsquo ve written in America magazine on popular media culture and theology many times over the last decade and since I rsquo ve even let slip a few rock and roll meditations in a mystagogical register on this very blog I thought there would be no ha

Today Pope Benedict offered nbsp an explanation of why he sought a rapprochement with the four excommunicated Lefebvrite bishops members of the Society of St Pius X nbsp His remarks are summarized by CNS below nbsp H t to David Gibson at Dotcommonweal nbsp At the same time the chief rabbi

The GOP has a GOM Grand Old Mess on its hands Apologies to Gladstone nbsp The election for a new party chairman is exposing the fact that the party has no idea how to proceed after two straight election losses George W Bush had become the boogeyman for the GOP It was all his fault This lin

Actor Matt Damon drew attention a couple months ago with a scathing tirade about Sarah Palin The thought of her as president he argued was like a really bad Disney movie The hockey mom you know Oh I m just a hockey mom from Alaska and she s the president and she s facing down Vlad

This just in from John Allen at NCR nbsp nbsp Bishop Fellay of the Society of St Pius X has released this statement in response to the controversy over Bishop Williamson s recent remarks We have become aware of an interview released by Bishop Richard Williamson a member of our Fraternity

John Updike one of the great nbsp American writers has died at the age of 76 nbsp Besides two Pulitzer Prizes and countless other awards Mr Updike also received the St Edmund Campion Award from America rsquo s editorial board for achievement in Christian letters in 1997 One of my fondest

In many ways South Africa is a laboratory of social change Most unexpectedly our little Catholic community has become an experiment in the minor religious department of that laboratory I refer of course to the new English texts of the Mass which have generated such surprising friction It appears

It was no accident that Pope Benedict XVI chose the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity to lift the excommunication of the four bishops illicitly ordained in Ec ne Switzerland in 1988 by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre The lifting of the ban was a step toward healing the breach between Rome an

I do not know whether the practice can be defined as torture under the Vienna Convention and I am certain it is not mentioned in the Army field manual for the interrogation of suspects but it is time to bring back the pillory Pillories are made of wood and they were used as a form of punishment i

Nicole Winfield of AP has the story here nbsp And Catholic News is reporting that Cardinal Walter Kasper called denial of the Holocaust stupid From her story The Vatican said Monday that comments by a recently rehabilitated bishop that no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust were unacceptable