Discover

ROME – With virtually no opposition leader left to imprison, the government of Nicaragua has moved on to its one remaining obstacle for securing reelection: The Church. According to Rosario Murillo, the country’s vice president, the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church are the “sons of the devil” who supported the months-long civil uprising that began in April 2018 that left at least 320 dead, thousands wounded, tens of thousands exiled, and deepened the political, social and economic crises in the Central American Country. “It was a diabolical interruption of a few weeks when they wanted to snatch everything from us to steal again, to settle there again, with blessings, which are truly unusual, unheard of blessings from people whose sanctity is in doubt, whose intermediation before ...

Solemnity of the Assumption(20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B) The first three evangelists, Saints Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all detail the same event from the Last Supper. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul recounts it in these words: “I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” At every Mass, we recall how Jesus instituted the Holy Eucharist the night before he died. But the Gospel of John does not feature these words of instituti...

Me Too and the continuing fallout from the sexual revolution NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A s you’ve probably heard by now, New York governor Andrew Cuomo is resigning in the wake of allegations of utter disrespect, to put it mildly, of women on his staff. He should have resigned much earlier for his cover-up of how badly New York State, under his orders, mishandled nursing homes during COVID-19. But on both fronts, our problems go beyond Cuomo. His behavior with women is totally in keeping with the politics of expanding abortion — and he has been a leader for this cause, in a place already considered the abortion capital of the U.S., no less. But while he unapologetically claims that the accusations of sexual harassment are just generational misunderstandings, the problem is really the sexual re...

The whole idea of Axios, as a news publication, is to take massive, complex stories and — using a combination of bullet lists and URLs to additional information — allow readers to quickly scan through the news of the previous day. The Axios team calls this “smart brevity.” More often than not, this turns out to be a crunched summary of the big ideas in mainstream coverage. Thus, it’s logical to look at this online newsletter’s take — “1 big thing: System failure” — on the horrific scenes that unfolded yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan. The big question: What did American diplomats, intellectuals and politicos miss in the big picture? * The United States was literally run out of town after 20 years, $1 trillion and 2,448 service members’ lives lost. * Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for t...

Happy Friday friends, It’s August, traditionally the “silly season” for journalists; the time when, absent bigger stories unfolding at their usual brisk pace, things which might otherwise struggle for attention become big news. Rome calling Probably the most-trafficked story in Catholic media this week was that Pope Francis took a phone call. I know, nail biting stuff, right? Toward the end of the Wednesday papal audience, a member of the pope’s security team handed Francis a mobile phone, into which he spoke briefly, before exiting the stage for less than five minutes and then returning.  One Italian journalist seems to have zoomed in on the iPhone screen, to show the caller was Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, the sostituto at the Secretariat of State – basically the pope’s curial...