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How to dress for cold weather, explained by an Arctic researcher…
Photo by iStockphoto/Getty Images Every bad winter that comes around, American need to relearn how to deal with, and dress for, cold weather. It’s more important now than ever, when staying safe out of reach from coronavirus means spending more time outside in the cold. When it comes to dressing for a hard winter, there are people who are experts in this particular area, for whom brutally cold environments are just part of the job. Cathy Geiger is a professor at the University of Delaware, and has studied the behavior of sea ice at both the arctic and Antarctic poles for more than three decades. Having worked on 10 polar expeditions, Geiger’s seen a lot (including some gross frostbite stuff that involves eyelashes; we’ll get to that). For the sake of clarity, because layering for sub-zero ...
What do we do with Father Rupnik’s art?
The mosaic of Nativity in the baptistery of the Saint Sebastian cathedral designed by Jesuit Father Marko Ivan Rupnik. Shutterstock The day that I saw reports that Jesuit Father Marko Ivan Rupnik had serially abused members of a women’s religious community — while serving as their chaplain in the 1990s — I was scheduled to concelebrate Mass at an altar he had designed. During the Mass, I was seeing red. I was so angry that I could barely look at the adornments that he — along with members of the Roman atelier Centro Aletti — had made. My eyes tried feebly to look past the mosaics, to simply cut the tabernacle from my view. But I couldn’t shake my eyes from the brilliant red side of the altar. The panel depicting the cross, emblazoned with the words Sanguis Christi, drips in my memory as I ...
The blood of St. Januarius just miraculously liquified for the third time in 2022 — watch the video here…..
Praise God for this amazing miracle! 🙌 The blood of St. Januarius liquified for the third time in 2022 on Dec. 16 at the Cathedral of Naples in Naples, Italy. The miracle of liquefaction occurred at the Cathedral’s Chapel Treasury at 10:56 a.m. local time, approximately two hours after chapel abbott Msgr. Vincenzo De Gregorio removed the reliquary from the safe. Watch the video below: [embedded content]Click here if you cannot see the video above. History of the Miracle of Liquefaction Dec. 16 is the the anniversary of Naples’ preservation from the 1631 Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption. The blood last liquified on Sept. 19 of this year. According to Vatican journalist Francesco Antonio Grana, the blood “almost never” liquifies on Dec. 16. While the Church does not officially ...
The great antidote to nihilism is gratitude…..
I’m becoming an N. S. Lyons fan. “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author’s Substack. (He writes under a pseudonym.) This extended essay provides an arresting account of the deepening crisis in the West. By Lyons’s reckoning, Lewis and Tolkien were right. We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress. Lyons notes “the disenchantment and demoralization of the world produced by foolishly blinkered intelligentsia” and “the catastrophic corruption of genuine education.” Our public culture provides ample evidence of “the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity ...
Pope Recognizes Martyrdom of Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, Executed With Their Seven Children for Hiding Jewish Family From Nazis …
The Nazi police then killed Wiktoria, who was seven months pregnant, and Józef. As children began to scream at the sight of their murdered parents, the Nazis shot them too: Stanisława, age 8, Barbara, 7, Władysław, 6, Franciszek, 4, Antoni, 3, and Maria, 2. Pope Francis signed the decree on their martyrdom on his 86th birthday, advancing 15 other causes for canonization, including recognizing the heroic virtue of Matteo Ricci, a well-known 17th-century Jesuit missionary in China. The pope also approved the “offering of life” of Franz de Castro Holzwarth, a Brazilian lawyer who was killed at the age of 38 in 1981 when he offered to replace a hostage during a prison riot. He also recognized a miracle attributed to the intercession of Venerable Jacinto Vera, the first bishop of Montevideo, Ur...
University of Mary wins six-year fight for religious freedom…..
A lesson should be learned: there is a time to fight, and the federal courts are often a favorable battleground. Friday’s federal court ruling that protects Catholic organizations from the Obamacare “transgender rule” should be a huge relief to Catholic families, healthcare workers and medical educators. But the latter group is not getting much attention in media reports, perhaps because journalists don’t quite see the relevance of the rule to Catholic education. In fact, there was much at stake for Catholic education in Friday’s ruling, which is why faithful University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, was part of the group that valiantly fought back against the federal government for more than six years. ‘We Had No Choice’ The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Biden ...
If you haven’t already seen the NOVA presentation, “Rebuilding Notre Dame,” let me strongly recommend it…
By Phil Lawler ( bio – articles – email ) | Dec 16, 2022 If you haven’t already seen the NOVA presentation, “Rebuilding Notre Dame,” let me strongly recommend it. In a bit under an hour, the show offers a fascinating glimpse at the challenges involved in rebuilding a magnificent cathedral. The devastating fire that ripped through Notre Dame in April 2019 did enormous damage to the Paris landmark. But it also caused two dangerous problems for the team of engineers, architects, and craftsmen who set out to repair the damage. First, the fire weakened the remaining structure of the basilica, raising questions about whether the ancient walls might collapse. Second, the lead that had lined the roof fell inside the building, coating the interior with toxic dust that had to be painstak...
Moral clarity is a requirement of love…
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Dec 16, 2022 Our Catholic World News service has already reported—and Phil Lawler has already commented—on President Biden’s unfortunate and morally confused declaration when he signed the new and morally inventive Respect for Marriage Act. In doing so, he claims to have struck “a blow against hate in all its forms” because “racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, they’re all connected”. What I wonder is why a president of the United States cannot think clearly about morality. It would seem to be the first requirement of sound government. First of all, of course, the language of our dominant secular and relativist culture has been deliberately stacked against morality as known through the Natural Law. To describe opposition ...
Take a close look at Tintoretto’s last ‘Last Supper’ — now THAT’s a halo…..
In a recent column about Mary Magdalene, I wrote that my favorite portrait of the great saint was by Domenico Robusti, known to the world as Domenico Tintoretto. But I also noted that it’s his father, Jacopo, who is the painter most often being referred to by the name Tintoretto. I didn’t explain an interesting thing about that name. Unlike Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, who is known by that last name, which is actually the place of his birth, there’s no place called Tintoretto. It’s a nickname meaning “little dyer.” Jacopo’s father, Battista (like the father of St. Francis of Assisi) was a cloth merchant who dyed dry goods – a tintore. Jacopo, probably not Domenico, got his start in life working for his father. As an artist, of course, Domenico learned much from Jacopo. Jacopo Ti...
If you knew what I discovered years ago about Archbishop Paglia, news about his crookedness wouldn’t surprise you a bit… …
On December 14, The Pillar reported the following: Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia diverted hundreds of thousands of euros allocated to support missionary and charitable works while he served as president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. Paglia used much of the money to finance building projects in Rome, including the renovation of his personal apartment. . . .According to multiple independent sources with knowledge of the events, Archbishop Paglia confirmed in a 2015 memo to Holy See financial officials that hundreds of thousands of euros had been paid to an Italian construction contractor instead of going to missionary and charitable projects to support poor families and orphans. While Paglia claimed to have repaid some of the money diverted from charitable funds, sources say th...
Vatican Confirms Pope’s Apology to Moscow Over Ukraine War Remarks…
Pope Francis. Franco Origlia, Getty Images The Vatican confirmed on Thursday that it had apologised to Russia after Pope Francis made comments singling out the allegedly cruel role of Russian ethnic minorities in the Ukraine conflict. Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni was asked about Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova saying on Thursday that the Vatican had apologised following the pope’s comments. “I can now confirm there were diplomatic contacts to that effect,” he said. Pope Francis had said in an interview in November that some of the “cruellest” actors among Russia’s ranks in Ukraine “are not of the Russian tradition”, but minorities like “the Chechens, the Buryati and so on”. This drew indignation from Rus...
German Catholicism, as seen through the documents of the Synodal Path, is in apostasy…
The Year of Our Lord 2023 will likely witness Catholic dramas we cannot predict now; that is the way of Providence. What we can know with certainty about next year is that the German crisis in the world Church will come to a head, because what’s happening in Germany will collide with the first session of the Synod on Synodality for a Synodal Church in October 2023. And the resolution of the German crisis will be, if not wholly determinative, then hugely consequential, in defining the legacy of Pope Francis. So what is happening in Germany, along its national “Synodal Path”? Many things are happening: a weaponization of the crime and sin of sexual abuse in order to reinvent Catholicism; the rejection of settled Catholic understandings of human love and its expression; an unconditional surre...
