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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...

The Holy See announced on Saturday a two-year renewal of its “provisional” agreement with the government of China, which was first signed in 2018, and renewed again two years ago. The agreement aims to normalize the appointment of bishops in China, and ensure unity of the Catholic Church – with some six to 12 million members – in the country. For his part, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, argued Saturday that the deal is “essential to the daily life of the Church” in China — repeating a frequent theme in his defense of the bilateral agreement. But while the cardinal insists the deal is a pragmatic necessity, questions about its effectiveness are stacking up. And human rights advocates argue that engagement with the Chinese Communist Party is sapping the ...

Hey everybody, Twenty-one years ago today, on October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP, and with it the last iconic Windows wallpaper, which has since become – probably – the most viewed photograph in all of history. You know the one I’m talking about. This hill: “Bliss,” Charles O’Rear. If you’re curious, the hill is in Sonoma, California, and is today covered in the grape-growing rows of a vineyard. A photographer named Charles O’Rear used to drive past the hill every week, when he made the trek to visit his girlfriend in Marin County each Friday. O’Rear snapped the photo some Friday in January 1996, and uploaded it to a stock photo agency’s website. The photographer didn’t think much about the picture again, until some designer a few years later at Microsoft decided i...

He’d lost his father, and he did not want to stop grieving. My friend feared that soon he wouldn’t feel so heartbroken, because that would mean “I was forgetting him.” Many who lose someone they love feel this way. I did, especially when my dad died. You feel he can’t be dead if you can still feel him as if he were with you. He’s just in the next room or on a trip. “Not here” doesn’t feel like “dead.” But the memories that make you feel as if he were with you fade very fast. I felt horrible when one day I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought of my dad in days. Sick to my stomach horrible. Outside prayers, 18 years later, I can go a long time without thinking of him. I remember him most when something triggers a memory. As I wrote a few years after he died, I’d go into a bookstore and see a b...

“And if from your cell phone you can delete this, delete it, so you won’t have temptation at hand. And if you can’t delete it, protect yourself properly so you don’t have access to this. I tell you, it weakens the soul.” Pope Francis explained that he wanted to bring up the problem of pornography because “it is a vice that so many people have — so many lay men, so many lay women, and even priests and religious sisters.” He added that he was not just talking about “criminal pornography, like child abuse,” but what some people might call “‘normal’ pornography.” “The devil enters from there. It weakens the priestly heart,” the pope repeated. Pope Francis brought up pornography as he responded to 10 questions from seminarians ranging from spiritual direction and priestly formation to...

On Oct. 19, the results of the “National Survey of Catholic Priests” were released by The Catholic Project and the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America and revealed the enormous toll the Church’s response to the sexual-abuse crisis has been having on American clergy. The “National Survey,” the largest study of Catholic priests in America in more than 50 years, is an ambitious attempt to assess the state of the priesthood in the United States as the Church marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. bishops’ “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.” Conducted by Gallup between February and June this year, the survey sought to interview 10,000 of the 35,000 Catholic priests in the country; 3,516 priests from 191 dioceses and eparchies responded. The autho...

Many women on social media suspect one new Taylor Swift song could be about miscarrying a child. The song entitled, “Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” moved countless women to share stories about pregnancy loss on social media. Swift’s lyrics discuss an undefined loss that makes her “sick with sadness.” She says goodbye to an individual she never met, but was “more than just a short time” and “should’ve been you.” October is also Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. Here’s the song below: [embedded content]Click here if you cannot see the video above. Countless women responded to the song on social media with their pregnancy and infant loss testimonies. Here’s what some women said below: YouTube user Stephanie Strangegirl wrote, “I was supposed to have twins. Only one survived. I carried a...

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Oct 25, 2022 The reluctance of bishops in the twenty-first century to excommunicate is understandable even if it may not ultimately be healthy. Our culture is extremely uncomfortable with the concept of authority. This is actually a serious problem in egalitarian societies, which have generally lost the understanding of authority as something conferred by God. It is a paradox of modern bureaucratic states, for example, that we follow more directives, rules and procedures than ever before based on our conception of “The State”, but we have lost all sense of authority as residing in particular persons. Obviously this was not as much of a problem in societies accustomed to authoritative differences based on birth and class, which for ...