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This notice comes from the traditionalist monastery, St Madeleine’s Abbey, in Le Barroux France:

Dear friends,

Maybe you know the sad news: my abbot emeritus and founder Dom Gérard Calvet is gone. Coming back from a funeral in his family, he had a blood problem in the brain on Wednesday and died yesterday, Thursday at 13.26. He was 80 years old.

Please pray for the repose of his soul, and for our community.
May God bless you all.

Fr. Basile (Rémi) VALUET o.s.b.
Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine
F–84330 LE BARROUX
FRANCE

Requiescat in pace.

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

This editorial by Michael McGough in the Los Angeles Times is a combination of fatuousness, pre-fab journalistic banality, and expected superficiality all rolled up in one, complete with de rigueur hat tips to superliberals Richard McBrien and Andrew Greeley. But it does make one good point: The eviscerated Catholicism of most American Catholics — whether professing to be “liberal” or “conservative” — is weak in the face of threats from outside.

Referencing the 1950 book which later gave us a mawkish, Americanist movie, McGough narrates the devolution of his own family’s Catholicism:

I made my first Communion nine years after “The Cardinal” was published, and the Mass was in Latin. Twelve years after that, my youngest sister made her first Communion and the Mass was in English. Sixteen years after that, when she accompanied her Lutheran husband to Sunday Eucharist at his childhood church, she felt right at home. And the revolving church door swings both ways: When two of my nephews who were baptized in the Lutheran church began attending their mother’s childhood Catholic parish, the adjustment was equally easy. We’re all psalm singers [Protestants] now.

Catholics are different than Protestants, doctrinally different, that is — and, yes, we’re supposed to be morally different as well, inasmuch as only in the true Church do we have God’s authentic morals revealed to men (e.g. divorce, birth control, obedience to lawful ecclesiastical authority, as well as all manifold moral implications inherent in our doctrines regarding the sacrament of Penance). When Catholics make the effort to show that “we’re just like everyone else — good Americans,” the salt loses its savor. It’s spiritually tasteless like everything else out there. We can be good Americans without losing our savor, by vigorously living, asserting, and treasuring what makes us citizens of the City of God and loving our Republic so much that we want our fellow Americans to belong to that same City.

But that’s intolerant, isn’t it?

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

PP agreed to take donations earmarked to reduce numbers of blacks

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

LOS ANGELES, February 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - UCLA’s pro-life student magazine, The Advocate, has revealed an undercover investigation in which representatives of Planned Parenthood enthusiastically accepted a financial donation targeting the abortion of an unborn black baby for racist motives.

Lila Rose, editor of The Advocate, says she has taped responses of Planned Parenthood officials from seven states that reveal the eugenic character of their ideology. Continue Reading »

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

To read her life, go here.

BENSALEM, Pennsylvania, FEB. 28, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The U.S. episcopal conference named the shrine of St. Katherine Drexel as a national shrine, making it the 27th with that title in the United States.

“It was with great pleasure that I received the news that the Shrine of St. Katharine Drexel has been elevated in status to a National Shrine,” said Cardinal Justin Rigali, archbishop of Philadelphia. “This designation is especially gratifying because Mother Katharine’s love of the Holy Eucharist and care for God’s poor and oppressed was formed in the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Continue Reading »

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

The Holy Father yesterday once again promoted evangelism, this time in very sanguine terms:

Pope Benedict XVI met on February 28 with bishops from El Salvador, who were concluding their ad limina visits to Rome. The Pontiff encouraged “ambitious and audacious efforts at evangelization” in the Central American country.

[Skip]

“Man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope,” the Pope said. He asked the bishops to help their people “discover the spiritual richness of their Baptism.” Strong efforts at evangelization, he went on, will help the laity “to acquire a strong ecclesial sense of belonging and solid doctrinal formation, especially as concerns the Church’s social doctrine where they will find clear criteria and guidance to illuminate the society in which they live.”

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Caracas, Feb. 28, 2008 (CWNews.com) - Supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have occupied the residence of the Archbishop of Caracas, the newspaper El Pais reports.

Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino denounced the action by members of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Cardinal Urosa Savino said: “Interrupting our work is an act of violence.”

President Chavez has frequently denounced the Catholic hierarchy of Venezuela, charging that the bishops are undermining his government by criticizing his tendencies toward autocratic government and mob rule. Chavez supporters have become steadily more aggressive in their hostility toward the nation’s bishops.

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Washington DC, Feb 28, 2008 / 10:50 pm (CNA).- Following recent revelations that a Planned Parenthood youth site has been promoting pornography to teenagers, three House representatives have called for the termination of Planned Parenthood’s federal funding, Cybercast News Service reports. Continue Reading »

newseditor :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

John Hagee, pastor of 19,000 member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, endorses John McCain because of his commitment to Israel. This promoter of the final conflagration says it’s all in the Bible, so let’s bring it on. That way Christ can come again, crush the enemies of Israel, and establish the millennium of peace. It’s all laid out in his book Jerusalem Countdown. McCain is proud to have Hagee’s endorsement. See article.

See also Bill Donohue’s statement on this, for the anti-Catholic angle.

Brian Kelly :: Feb.29.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

If one’s conscience is corrupt enough to support abortion, even partial-birth abortion, then what’s to stop one from approving infanticide?  As Senator, Barack Obama has voted twice in favor of killing babies after birth if they survived a botched abortion. Here’s the story.

Brian Kelly :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

OK. Awkward headline, but it captures my mood when reading this article.

The wildly successful author of horror fiction returned to her Catholic faith in the late 1990s and now writes historical fiction about the life of Jesus. Her latest, “Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana,” is to be published in March. It focuses on the early years of Jesus’ ministry.

Benedicta Cipolla of Religion News Service said the novel “is in many ways an orthodox response” to “The Da Vinci Code.” Rice calls the Dan Brown blockbuster “load of nonsense.”

In what Cipolla calls “a direct salvo at ‘Da Vinci,’” Rice says in the author’s note to the new book: “It is more than ever important to affirm our belief in Christ as sinless and unmarried because that is the way the gospels present Him.”

Later we learn that Miss Rice’s volume is not without nonsense of its own:

“I can draw a valid portrait of him according to Scripture as a sinless, celibate man,” Rice said in an interview. “Not some feminized pious image floating off the ground, but a real, virile man subject to noticing the beauty of the girls of Nazareth.”

Jesus may notice beauty and even be tempted by the idea of marriage with a local young woman, but in keeping with Rice’s beliefs and her Gospel source material, there are no lustful thoughts as in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and definitely no wedding vows.

The part about “feminized pious image” was nice, but she lost me after that. This is a sort of neo-orthodoxy that flirts too much with the world as it tries to maintain the straight line of the Gospel. As God and Man, Jesus could notice beauty, even feminine beauty. As God he created it and as man he had a perfect aesthetic sense. No problem. But “tempted by the idea of marriage with a local young woman” is over the top. Our Lord had no concupiscence.

I don’t want to dismiss Anne Rice. She’s come a long way. Perhaps her friendship with Archbishop Hannan will take her even further.

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Read this story, the latest on the ongoing complaint of the Russian Orthodox about Catholic dioceses in Russia. Note that the Moscow Patriarchate’s spokesman is Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, or, as he is more generally known, “Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria.”

In light of that title, does not the complaint ring hollow?

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

MOROCCO, February 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Human Rights Watch (HRW), an organization that has long been committed to promoting homosexual behavior and abortion as human “rights”, has now targeted the government of Morocco.

The organization, working together with the “Moroccan Human Rights Association”, is “urging” the government of Morocco to repeal its laws banning sodomy. Under Moroccan law, those who are convicted of the crime can spend up to three years in prison. To pressure the government, HRW is gathering signatures for an on-line petition. Continue Reading »

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

During his visit to Indonesia on February 25th, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pledged military support for the sprawling Southeast Asian nation. The United States has thereby furthered its self-appointed role to be Policeman of the World. [Full Story]

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

After suffering from diabetes and emphysema according to his son Christopher, William F. Buckley, Jr. was found dead at his Connecticut home on February 27th.

Two links of interest:

• “William F. Buckley, Leading Conservative, Dies at 82“
• John F. McManus’ Commentary at jbs.org

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

BALTIMORE, Maryland, FEB. 27, 2008 (Zenit.org). - In the fight against AIDS, abstinence-based programs that focus on changing behaviors rather than handing out condoms simply work better, says an AIDS expert.

Matthew Hanley has been a HIV/AIDS technical adviser at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) for the last seven years and is the author of the forthcoming book “Avoiding Risk, Affirming Life: Science, Love, and AIDS.”

In this interview with ZENIT, Hanley comments on the programs and principles that have led to dropping rates of HIV prevalence in Africa.

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

The full address is on Zenit’s site.

In a beautiful text St. Augustine defines prayer as an expression of desire, and affirms that God answers by moving our hearts closer to him. For our part we should purify our desires and our hopes in order to receive God’s gentleness (cfr. “In I Ioannis,” 4, 6). In fact, this alone — opening ourselves up to others — can save us.

Let us pray therefore that we are able to follow the example of this great man every day of our lives, and in every moment that we live, encounter the Lord Jesus — the only one who can save us, purify us, and who gives us true joy and true life.

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Mr. Lawler is commenting on the recent Pew study making headlines all over. He draws some lessons from the data and uses it all as an “I told you so” opportunity to plug his book, The Faithful Departed (and rightly so!).

Catholics still constitute the single largest religious denomination in the US, accounting for 23.9% of the adult population. (Evangelical churches, taken as a group, are home to 26.3% of the American people; but they are divided among the different Protestant denominations.) Baptists run a distant second, with 12.7%. If they qualified as a separate denomination, the Americans who have deserted the Catholic Church of their childhood would constitute the third-largest religious group in the country, with 10.1% of the population.

The Pew study, based on exhaustive polling, found that Americans switch their religious affiliations frequently. About 44% of adult Americans now belong to a church different from the one in which they were raised. The Religious Landscape Survey shows that mainline Protestant churches have suffered the most severe losses, and Protestants are now barely clinging to their majority status, with 51% of the population. The largest gains show up, ominously, in the “unaffiliated” category, which now accounts for 16% of America’s increasingly secularized people.

Lawler goes on to note that the survey counted as Catholics participants in the poll who do not practice the faith and/or do not believe in its teachings. The self-identified Catholics of the former category are bad Catholics; those of the latter are not Catholics. So, the total number leaving the Church is actually even higher than the study shows.

Now, if these defectors had been taught by their bishops, priests, religious instructors, and parents — loud and clear, and along with all the other fortifying doctrines of our Faith — that there is no salvation outside the Church, do you think they would leave in such numbers?

Phil isn’t the only one with an “I told you so” opportunity!

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Washington DC, Feb 28, 2008 / 06:15 am (CNA).- On Wednesday a full transcript of Democrat presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s July 2007 speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in which he vigorously defended legalized abortion became available.

In the July 17 speech, Obama attacked the Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban and the nomination of Supreme Court justices who favor overturning Roe v. Wade. In the speech the senator said, “There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield.” Continue Reading »

newseditor :: Feb.28.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

 From Catholic Church Conservation:

“I have no doubt that the Tridentine rite is the true liturgy,” the journalist Michele Mirabella (64) has said to the Italian website ‘Papanews’.

Mirabella is a well-known television presenter on Italian state television. He loves the Latin language: “A frivolous modernism has meant that in recent times even the Church has neglected the Latin language ” - he says.

The outriders of the Second Vatican Council claimed to be able to rationalise what by nature cannot be rationalised:

“Therefore, frivolity and a tendency to the banal too often triumphed, while in the old Rite everything was more sober, purer and more elegant.” [Full article]

newseditor :: Feb.27.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off

Once upon a time, when an American bishop wanted to establish a religious congregation (say, of teaching sisters), he got on a boat to Ireland, recruited some generous-hearted, faithful, and energetic Irish girls, and brought them back, donning them in habits and sending them somewhere for formation. As far as priests go, the delightful brogue of Erin has been heard on pulpits around the world, both in the missions and in regular parochial assignments abroad. I can think of numerous clerics from the Old Sod — including strict traditionalists — who have administered the sacraments to me. But now, the vocations market to the world is shriveling up, according to this report from the UK’s Times Online:

Ireland, a country that used to export its Catholic clergy around the world, is running out of priests at such a rate that their numbers will have dropped by two thirds in the next 20 years, leaving parishes up and down the land vacant.

The decline of Catholic Ireland, for decades the Pope’s favourite bastion of faith in Europe, has been regularly predicted, as the economic successes of the Celtic Tiger brought growing secularisation. But new figures have starkly set out the fate of the Irish priesthood if action is not taken by the Church to reverse the trend.

One-hundred and sixty priests died last year but only nine were ordained. Figures for nuns were even more dramatic, with the deaths of 228 nuns and only two taking final vows for service in religious life.

Based upon these figures The Irish Catholic newspaper predicts that the number of priests will drop from the current 4,752 to about 1,500 by 2028. [Full story]

newseditor :: Feb.27.2008 :: Uncategorized :: Comments Off