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Recently I was talking to a group of young adult Catholics and mentioned a gospel passage that they said they had never heard. It is the Gospel of the Temple Tax and how Jesus told Peter to go catch a fish and, in its mouth will be a coin that will pay the Temple Tax for Jesus and Peter. In a certain sense it is one of the more charming gospel passages and kind of “cool.” It shows Jesus’ sovereignty over creation and the rather interesting twist of finding money in the mouth of a certain fish from a large large of likely millions of fish. In the Holy Land today, when you have a meal near the Sea of Galilee, many of the restaurants serve “Peter’s Fish” that is served with a coin in its mouth. The bible study students before me, mostly in their early thirties, were perplexed that they had ne...

COLUSA — A Catholic church was vandalized this week in Colusa County. Police are calling the act a hate crime.    The tight-knit Catholic community in Colusa says seeing their place of worship completely desecrated has left them shaken up after 67-year-old James Stoltenberg allegedly vandalized the Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. Stoltenberg is suspected to have broken into the church on Oct. 25 and caused $10,000 worth of damage. He was arrested two days later as church security video captured the incident. James Stoltenberg   Solano County Sheriff’s Office Images from the incident show the baptismal font desecrated, the tabernacle thrown, Eucharist strewn across the floor, and obscenities carved onto the altar. Deacon Dr. Julian Delgado says many of the items de...

There is a house down the street from us that becomes an object of annual interest to my children as the days grow short and the nights cold. When we go for evening walks, they pause before it with wide eyes. Skeletons carrying coffins march across the lawn. A spectral bride’s veil stirs in the breeze. Grinning zombies lurk in the bushes, prisoners gnash their teeth in crow cages, and monstrous spiders crawl up the porch rails. Tombstones, jack-o-lanterns, and skulls complete the macabre yet playful neighborhood spectacle that my kids behold in wonder every October. As we took it in this year, remarking on a couple of new cadaverous additions, my son scratched his scruffy 10-year-old head and said, “Dad, what does Halloween celebrate?” The further our culture falls away from the celebratio...

By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 28, 2022 Last week in this space, I expressed my dismay at the news that Pope Francis had appointed a pro-abortion scholar to the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL)— and Archbishop Vincenzio Paglia, the president of the PAL, had compounded the problem by adopting the rhetoric of the abortion lobby and insisting that his new colleague was not “pro-abortion” but merely “pro-choice.” Then we learned that another newly appointed member of the PAL had indulged in pro-abortion sloganeering, saying that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, “undermines basic requirements of tolerance toward the pluralism of moral perspectives within society.” So there were two avowed proponents of legal abortion among the 14 ne...

Northern Ireland’s predominantly Protestant identity has been its foundational premise ever since its creation a century ago — until now. “We are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant State,” the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, Sir James Craig, confidently asserted before the legislature of the nascent state in 1921. His successor, Basil Brooke, went further and admonished a group of Protestant farmers: “Many in this audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. … If we in Ulster allow Roman Catholics to work on our farms, we are traitors to Ulster,” he said. Both men typified the founding narrative of Northern Ireland. Created in 1921 in the six northeastern counties of Ireland, it was to remain part of the United Kingdom when the 26 southern counties won inde...