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NH is again considering passing a physician assisted suicide bill. HB1659 will get a hearing on March 4. It says: “This bill allows a mentally competent person who is 18 years of age or older and who has been diagnosed as having a terminal disease by the patient’s attending physician and a consulting physician to request a prescription for medication which will enable the patient to control the time, place, and manner of such patient’s death.” Sounds compassionate. Those who argue for physician assisted suicide often paint an emotional picture of a dying patient who’s unable to escape immense pain, and who’s simply looking for release and relief. But statistically, that’s not what happens. Rehumanize International reports: From a study of the results of Oregon’s 2013 Death with Dignity Act...

None of us likes to think we are prideful. It’s always someone else; that guy over there is the arrogant one. One way of gauging is to ponder how well we accept being corrected. Consider the following verses from Proverbs: He who corrects an arrogant man earns insult; and he who reproves a wicked man incurs opprobrium. Reprove not an arrogant man, lest he hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you. Instruct a wise man, and he becomes still wiser; teach a just man, and he advances in learning (Proverbs 9:7-12). Which one are you?Do you bristle when someone corrects you or do you grow wiser from the input you receive? It’s not easy to accept criticism or correction without feeling some degree of humiliation, particularly when it is public in some manner. Of course, the...

ROME – During the Roman Empire, the entire Mediterranean region was known as Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea.” It was an imperial assertion of dominance, of course, but it also reflected the idea that the peoples of the Mediterranean are linked by geography and destiny, sharing a common fate. In a nutshell, that’s the same intuition that will carry Pope Francis to the Italian costal city of Bari on Sunday, to wrap up a Feb. 19-23 assembly of more than 50 Catholic bishops from 19 Mediterranean nations, hosted by the über-powerful Italian bishops’ conference. (As an aside, one could make the case that after the Vatican, the two most powerful Catholic entities in Europe are the German and Italian bishops’ conferences, both of which benefit from Church tax collections in their countries that allow them...

In 1778, two decades before he became the second president of the United States, John Adams nearly died at sea. Actually, by his own count, he came close to dying six different times. I discovered this while researching my new book, Author in Chief, which traces the history of U.S. presidents and the books they wrote. Adams, it turns out, wrote America’s first presidential memoir shortly after leaving office. Autobiography has always been popular in this country. Of the first five presidents, three others besides Adams tried writing their life stories, though they usually focused on their public roles and refused to share anything too personal. Adams’s book was different because Adams was different. He was emotional and impulsive, and those traits pushed him to write an autobiography that ...

Geneva, Switzerland, Feb 17, 2020 / 07:00 pm (CNA).- The first Catholic Mass in nearly five hundred years will be celebrated at a cathedral in Geneva later this month. Mass will be said in the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre de Genève on Feb. 29, in a decision announced by the Diocese of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg’s episcopal vicariate for the city. The cathedral was the seat of the Catholic bishops of Geneva from the fourth century until the Protestant Reformation. The last Mass celebrated at the cathedral took place in 1535. After the Reformation, the building was taken over by John Calvin’s Reformed Protestant Church, which destroyed the cathedral’s statues and paintings, and banned Catholic worship. Fr. Pascal Desthieux, the Catholic episcopal vicar for Geneva, described the cathedral as ...