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Pope Francis said that for his birthday on December 17, he was shown a unique Nativity scene, dubbed “Let Mum Rest.” In the depiction, which has been making the rounds this year on social media, Mary is sleeping and Joseph is holding a tired Baby with his arms outstretched in a typical newborn pose. The pope said the image shows “the tenderness of a family, of a marriage.” “How many of you have to share the night between husband and wife for the baby boy or girl who cries, cries, and cries,” he reflected. This is, precisely, the message of the Nativity scene, the pope explained. And we can also invite the Holy Family to our home, where there are joys and concerns, where every day we wake up, eat, and sleep close to our loved ones. The manger is a domestic Gospel. Francis this year has been...

The novelist supported a tax expert who was fired for dissenting from gender orthodoxy Progressives are denouncing JK Rowling this week, insisting that she has ruined Harry Potter in a single tweet. One can almost hear them cry, “burn the books!”  What’s puzzling about this is that JK Rowling is hardly a conservative opponent of all things liberal. On the contrary, she’s the consummate liberal with all the right opinions for an elite culture producer. So what opinion of hers could possibly warrant such severe sanctions? What could she say that has the power to ruin Potter forever? Rowling wrote a single tweet in support of Maya Forstater, a tax expert who was fired from her job at the Centre for Global Development for stating on social media that a person cannot change their biologica...

By Tom Hoopes, December 19, 2019 It is appropriate that the Church focuses on St. Joseph for the Fourth Week of Advent, Year A. Joseph is the patron saint of preparing for Christmas — and, as Patron of the Church, for the Second Coming of Christ. We are closer than ever before to the Second Coming of Christ. We are living in the world’s “fourth week of Advent” — the end days, according to the Church; “the last hour.” It’s time for last-minute preparations, the same preparations as Joseph made. First, Joseph took his wife’s cross onto himself. When Mary is found with child, “Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.” You don’t have to know anything about the ancient world to understand what this means. If a m...

When it comes to our struggle in personal prayer there are some things that we need to unlearn. For too many, private prayer is often a formal, even stuffy affair, that drips of boredom and unnecessary formality and has lots of rules. Perhaps we learned some of our lessons too well. And yet many of the youngest children have not learned these lessons, and they seem to pray with great ease. They are unassuming and will say almost anything to God. It is true that children may have a lot learn about public and liturgical prayer, but when it comes to personal and private prayer they have much to teach us. Perhaps a parable is in order: A young girl received her First Holy Communion and, when she returned to her pew, she was noticed by her parents to be in rather deep prayer. After Mass they as...

ROME – Last Friday, Pope Francis took part in the inauguration of a new headquarters in Rome for Scholas Occurrentes, a high-tech network of schools around the world inspired by the pontiff. The first lady of his native Argentina, Fabiola Yañez, was on hand, as were the first ladies of Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia and Belize. At one stage Francis and Yañez exchanged a hug of greeting, which was captured by a photographer who later discovered a curiosity in the image: On his right hip, under his white papal cassock, Francis was wearing a small black electronic device with a green light and various buttons. On Dec. 18, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruini told Crux the device was a rarely used radio microphone, which had to be put on the pope in that tight space because of the angles and acoustics ...

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponents are courting voters with less than a year before the 2020 election – and many of them are chasing support from a variety of religious voters. The Trump campaign announced last week that the president’s re-election efforts would include launching three coalitions: “Evangelicals for Trump,” “Catholics for Trump” and “Jewish Voices for Trump.” Despite being impeached by the House, the Trump campaign’s focus on these three religious groups aims to expand the president’s support, especially in battleground states where the former real-estate mogul won in 2016. An analysis of the 2018 midterm elections conducted by Pew Research Center found continuity in the voting patterns of key religious groups. For example, white evangelica...