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April 8, 2021 “Unless we stand up today, women’s and girl’s sports and all of our opportunities will fade away. We all know it. It will not take long until there will be an entire male/female team,” said Beth Stelzer, founder of Save Women’s Sports. Stelzer is described as a “housewife, mom, and amateur powerlifter in Minnesota” on Save Women’s Sports, which is “a coalition that seeks to preserve biology-based eligibility standards for participation in female sports.” Follow her @BethStelzer on Twitter. Join Our Telegram Group : Salvation & Prosperity  

We live in times in which mercy, like so many other things, has become a detached concept in people’s minds, separated from the things that really help us to understand it. For indeed, mercy makes sense and is necessary because we are sinners in desperate shape. Yet many today think it unkind and unmerciful to speak of sin as sin. Many think that mercy is a declaration that God doesn’t really care about sin, or that sin is not a relevant concept. On the contrary, mercy means that sin does exist. Thanks be to God for the glory, the beauty, and the gift of His mercy! Without it, we don’t stand a chance. I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly going to need boatloads of grace and mercy to make it. Only through grace and mercy can we be freed from sin and healed from its effects, or ever hop...

ROME – According to German Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the personal secretary of Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, it’s not appropriate to make a “papal ranking,” and acknowledged that the former pope has been misinterpreted not only by foes, but also by friends. “Everyone knows that the figure and work of Benedict XVI have encountered resistance, opposition and rejection in certain environments,” Gänswein said. “And not so much because of the way he communicates, but rather because of the specific contents of his teaching.” “This is an unpleasant experience for all those who follow a clear and unclouded line in proclaiming and defending the Catholic faith,” he continued, differentiating these critics from those who bought the “stereotypes and clichés” about the former pope, who served as prefect...

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter and Divine Mercy Sunday. It’s not a Sunday after Easter but a Sunday of Easter, because the entire Easter Season — the 50 days from Easter to Pentecost — is one unified celebration of the Paschal Mystery in which “the joy of the Resurrection” cannot be contained in a single day or even octave. Easter is 50 days long. Last Sunday’s Gospels left us at the empty tomb — the Gospel for the Easter Vigil related the encounter of Mary Magdalene and her companions with the young man, who shows them the empty tomb. The Gospel for Mass on Easter Day recounted how Sts. Peter and John went to the tomb and found it empty, seeing the burial linens set aside and “seeing and believing.”  Today’s Gospel (John 20:19-31) relates the Apostles’ first encounter with the ...

Suffering is not just a problem to be solved — it is a mystery to be endured in union with God Incarnate, who “suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day.” Why must the wicked appear always to prosper, while the innocent are made to suffer, seeing all their efforts come to grief? It is a question at least as old as the Book of Job, which framed the problem in such a way as to place God himself in the dock. Who, in the eyes of a disbelieving world, cannot possibly acquit himself of the charge.  How does the argument run? That if God were all-good, then obviously he would wish to rid the world of evil — and if his powers were equal to his goodness, then he’d surely have done so by now. But the world God made remains a fallen and unjust place, engulfed by the flames o...

When I first heard the news April 6 that the 93-year-old Swiss theologian and author had died, I had just finished the prayers for the fifth day of the Novena of Divine Mercy. The death of Father Hans Küng during the novena necessarily frames our Christian reaction.  For the novena’s fifth day, Jesus had asked St. Faustina Kowalska, and through her us, to bring to him “the souls of those who have separated themselves from my Church and immerse them in the ocean of my mercy.”  The Polish Sister of Our Lady of Mercy, in turn, begged Jesus to “receive into the abode of your most compassionate heart the souls of those who have separated themselves from your Church” and implored God the Father to “turn your merciful gaze upon the souls of those who have separated themselves from your ...

A new worship center in the former East Berlin represents the ultimate secular view of religion. It also reflects the kind of cultural future the American left envisions for the U.S. The House of One, to be built on the foundation of a demolished church, will enable Christians, Jews and Muslims to worship under one roof. Each faith will have its own sanctuary surrounding a central hall that will serve “as a place of public encounter, much like an urban square surrounded by different buildings,” according to the architectural firm Kuehn Malvezzi. Contractors will lay the foundation stone in May, and construction is expected to take four years. “East Berlin is a very secular place,” Roland Stolte, a Christian theologian involved in the project, told the Guardian. “Religious institutions have...

Of all modes of transportation, airplanes are statistically the safest way to travel. According to a study conducted from 2000 to 2009 by Ian Savage, economics professor at Northwestern University, airplanes caused the least number of passenger deaths per one billion miles traveled (0.07), while motorcycles caused the most (213). Still, we don’t blame you if you are afraid to fly. While turbulence and claustrophobia are two main reasons travelers feel uneasy on airplanes, it’s the landing that often keeps people on the edge of their seats. Of course, landings can be anxiety-inducing for a number of reasons, from limited visibility and small airstrips to navigating through the world’s tallest mountain range. Here, AD rounds up nine of the most terrifying airports to fly in...

For the second time in less than a year, the Diocese of Duluth celebrated on Wednesday the appointment of a new bishop. This time, Duluth Catholics are probably hoping the appointment sticks.  But filling Duluth’s episcopal vacancy was a process that lasted nearly 17 months, pointing to questions about the process for appointing new bishops in the United States, and about whether dioceses, like parishes across the country, might soon begin to merge. Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary in Duluth, Minnesota. Credit: Farragutful/CC BY-SA 4.0 The April 7 appointment of Fr. Dan Felton as the tenth bishop to the small Minnesota Diocese of Duluth came after unusual circumstances. Felton was the second priest named to the job, which became vacant after the December 2019 death of Bishop Paul S...

Priests stand in front of a crucifix as Pope Francis leads a mass in Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican in 2013. (Tony Gentile/Reuters) We shouldn’t forget where the idea that we are all equal, unique personalities, each possessed of unfathomable dignity and inviolable rights, came from. The most important lesson that the study of history teaches us is contingency. Things did not have to turn out the way they did. Take, for instance, the answer that our civilization has historically given to the most important question of all: “What does it mean to be a human being?” Ever since the Enlightenment, many people in the West have had the impression that answering this question is easy, that it’s just a matter of observing human behavior empirically across time and space and then abstract...

“If any specific day is to be singled out from the rest and celebrated as a festival, this can only be done as the manifestation of a perpetual though hidden festivity.” Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity Easter joy. In these powerful words is signified a reality at the heart of Christianity. Easter is a celebration. It is a matter of joy, and joy happens when we receive something beloved. Any real festivity is a matter of receiving something: something that is marvelously good and transcends our own doing or crafting. To be festive is to receive a gift and to enter it, with open arms and heart. And to be transformed by it—in all that we do and craft. Who could have imagined? Reality is always better than we have yet realized! Truly to feast is to strive to realize...

This means that while overturning Roe would probably prompt a pro-choice backlash in reaction to the court’s decision, there would be ample opportunities, in a world where abortion is returned to the democratic process, to make a pro-life case. But the anti-abortion cause is closely linked to a culturally bunkered Republican Party and a weakened religious right, it has few media megaphones and weak financial backing, and a lot of the country just seems not to want to think too much about abortion and to punish the party that forces it to do so. So it’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all (mostly limitations in the second trimester, along the lines of many European countries), but then for the few states that go further to find themsel...