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In Another 6-3 Religious Freedom Win, Supreme Court Sides With Web Designer Opposed to Same-Sex Marriage…
Smith told CNA in December 2022: “I serve everyone, including those who identify as LGBT. I love to custom create and will work with anyone — there are simply some messages I can’t create regardless of who asks me.” She said her case is about freedom of speech for all artists. “After I started my own design studio, I wanted to expand my portfolio to custom-create art and websites to tell stories about weddings, but Colorado made it clear I wasn’t welcome in that space.” She said she challenged the law because she didn’t want “to be punished for saying what I believe.” “Colorado officials are censoring my speech and forcing me to speak messages about marriage that are inconsistent with my beliefs — the core of who I am.” More in US The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was among the...
Getting in over our heads in the life of prayer…
By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Jun 21, 2023 “Put out into the deep…” (Lk 5:4) That was the admonition that Jesus gave to his disciples: an admonition that Pope John Paul II repeated in the conclusion of his for the Great Jubilee, Novo Millennio Ineunte. It sounds so easy. But it takes courage. The oceans, with their unfathomed depths and their incalculable powers, can be dangerous—as today’s news headlines remind us. When we speak of the “oceans” of God’s mercy—even deeper, even stronger—we must speak with awe. St. Aloysius Gonzaga, whose feast we are celebrating, used that image in a letter to his mother, which appears in the Office of Readings today. He wrote: The divine goodness, most honoured lady, is a fathomless and shoreless ocean, and I confess that when I ...
Humans are curious by nature. Properly directed curiosity is healthy. Misdirected curiosity is hellish…..
By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio – articles – email ) | Jun 27, 2023 Our capacity for curiosity is a curious thing. God implanted in us a desire for an expanding spirit of inquiry with temporary satisfactions. St. Augustine recognizes these attributes: “You have made us for Yourself, O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Depending upon how we use it, curiosity is hellish or healthy. Misdirected curiosity is hellish. St. Paul provides a moral term for inquiries that violate natural secrets: busybody (cf. 2 Thess. 2:11). We all have natural secrets, from the details of our infirmities to secret repented sins. Even secular institutions recognize the propriety of many secrets. Gossip rooted in unjust curiosity is a violation of the Eighth Commandment. Busybodies im...
What do you get out of Mass? Here’s what…..
[embedded content] It’s been said that familiarity breeds contempt. For Catholics, I think there’s a temptation for familiarity to breed complacency. We are all susceptible of taking for granted that which is closest to us, including the Mass. While Sacred Tradition is very important to understand the fullness of our faith, if we get too comfortable, our experience of Catholicism can be reduced to rituals alone, going through the motions week in and week out, disconnected from our ‘real lives’. I love the quote I heard recently that “true tradition isn’t the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.” Amen… Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums
What if all the things you “own” are more truly owned by someone else?
I often struggle with how to think about my possessions, the things I own and how to use them. Today I was struck by something that, if I take it seriously, could radically change my thinking. I am assigned to attend to my things by someone else. And thus these things are only ‘mine’ inasmuch as they are given (indeed leant) for me to care for—according to a plan of the first owner. If true, this really is a game-changer. Sure, I’ve heard this before, even to the point of it seeming quaint. But sometimes—and how grateful I am—something can really strike us anew. The great Ambrose of Milan wrote, “We are not ourselves the masters, but rather the stewards of the property of others.” And the following words are attributed to John Chrysostom: “Therefore, whoever you are, know yourself to be a ...
What I said at the Lincoln Memorial…
One year ago today, a grievously unjust law was overturned. The story of how America came to kill, on an industrial scale, human beings in their mothers’ wombs is a terrifying one. Tens of millions of human lives destroyed. The scale of destruction is so great that, after searching for it’s closest analogy in the evil of slavery, we often look to the infanticide practiced by ancient Carthage. Carthage was an empire of extraordinary material success not unlike our own — they valued “productivity,” they were proud of their “practicality.” They loved luxury. At their wealthiest and most decadent, they sacrificed their newborn babies on the foulest altars of false gods. Since 1973, so have we. For a half century, our country has “offered up” tens of millions of vulnerable human lives on a fals...
In Unanimous Decision for Religious Freedom, Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Christian Postal Worker Who Refused to Work Sundays …
In 2019, Groff resigned from his position with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) after years of allegedly being harassed, targeted, and disciplined for refusing to work Sundays so that he could abide by the Third Commandment, to “keep holy the sabbath day.” Groff then sued the USPS for violating his religious rights. After his claims were denied by both a Pennsylvania district court and the 3rd Circuit Court, the Supreme Court agreed to take up his appeal in January. The court’s decision is expected to have a major impact on the religious rights of employees across the country. More in US According to the religious liberty law firm Becket, under the Hardison precedent, 86% of workplace religious accommodation requests are denied. “Hardison’s ‘de minimis test’ has been used by large compa...
‘Great Adventure With Christ’: Catholic Summer Camps for Kids and Teens Offer Spiritual Nourishment and Time in God’s Creation…
Catholic summer camps are incorporating an outside-the-box approach. There is a new trend of Catholic summer camps that are moving away from a traditional model of a Vacation Bible School (VBS) program. Catholic summer camps for kids and teens are now placing elements such as outdoor wilderness activities and exploring nature at the forefront of their focus. These camps can be seen providing a combination of outdoor fun and spiritual nourishment. Some examples of Catholic summer camps that demonstrate this essential combination include: Annunciation Heights, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Catholic Youth Summer Camp. Annunciation Heights Annunciation Heights is a youth and familycamp and retreat center located in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It focuses primarily on developing a love f...
Blessed Nykyta Budka, Canadian Citizen Who Died in a Soviet Prison Camp, Pray For Us!…
Blessed Nykyta Budka died in 1949 and was beatified by John Paul II in 2001, along with Blessed Vasyl Velychkovsky and other Ukrainian martyrs. The optional memorial of Blessed Nykyta Budka (and Vasyl Velychkowsky, another Ukrainian Catholic bishop) is celebrated June 27 by dioceses in Canada. As I noted previously, the Church’s task is to produce saints, but there are only so many days available on the Church’s calendar to celebrate them. We collectively honor them all on All Saints Day (Nov. 1), but some saints are more relevant to particular countries or areas as compared to the universal Church. To understand Blessed Nykyta’s connection to Canada, one should know something about Canadian immigration policy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States drew immigra...
The devil is not a fantasy or a pre-scientific delusion. The devil is real. Deal with it…..
The devil is back on the Big Screen in the 2023 film “The Pope’s Exorcist.” But he never really left the stage. He’s not a metaphor. He’s not a fairytale. And as awkward as it might seem to an urbane and modern world, we need to take his existence, and his role in human affairs, seriously. Leszek Kolakowski was one of the great minds of the last century. He was a leading Marxist philosopher in Poland until he began asking unpleasant questions about life in the Soviet Union under Stalin. That kind of indiscretion got him silenced. Then it got him exiled to the West. He went on to become one of the 20th century’s most productive men of letters. Kolakowski gave a very curious talk at Harvard in 1987 entitled “The Devil in History.” Many of the people in the audience knew Kolakowski’s work. Th...
U.S. Church Attendance Still Lower Than Pre-Pandemic, Says Gallup Poll…
Story Highlights Church attendance down an average four points since before the pandemic Declines in attendance are seen among most key subgroups Churchgoers are mainly back in person, but 5% still attend virtually WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. church attendance has shown a small but noticeable decline compared with what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the four years before the pandemic, 2016 through 2019, an average of 34% of U.S. adults said they had attended church, synagogue, mosque or temple in the past seven days. From 2020 to the present, the average has been 30%, including a 31% reading in a May 1-24 survey. The recent church attendance levels are about 10 percentage points lower than what Gallup measured in 2012 and most prior years. ###Embeddable### The coronavirus pandem...
Ticks jump from trees, and 10 other myths about ticks, debunked…
Warmer weather is here, which means tick season is in full swing. Like other creepy crawlies that feed on our blood and spread disease, ticks can cause a lot of anxiety, which has led to plenty of misinformation regarding how dangerous they are, how they find prey, and the best ways to get rid of them. Before venturing outdoors, read up on the most common myths about ticks. After spotting a tick latched to their body, some people make the problem worse by grabbing a lighter. According to the myth, burning a tick off your skin is the most efficient way to remove it—but Kirby C. Stafford, emeritus scientist of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says this thinking is misguided. “Imagine trying to burn something the size of a sesame seed or poppy seed or smaller attached closely ...
