Spirit & Life Blog

Perhaps the only thing that should be surprising about a Catholic priest’s recent decision to deny Holy Communion to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is that anyone is surprised. On Sunday, Oct. 27, Fr. Robert E. Morey at St. Anthony Catholic Church in Florence, South Carolina, refused to give Holy Communion to Biden. Fr. Morey…

The Gruesome Violence of Abortion It should come as no surprise to anybody, but the fact is that many abortionists are not psychologically and spiritually well, to put it mildly. The mainstream media does its best to cover their tracks. But anybody who follows abortion-related news closely can’t help but be struck by the never-ending…

Imagine for a moment that a courageous undercover journalist embedded herself among a group of powerful and wealthy businessmen involved in some horrific crime – sex-trafficking, for instance. Imagine the journalist had surreptitiously recorded conversations in which these powerful men openly haggled over the prices of their victims and spilled the details about how they…

Normalizing LGBT Ideology A depressingly true image has been making the rounds on social media. I can’t seem to find the original right now. But if I recall correctly, the text on the image goes something like this: “2009: How will legalizing gay marriage personally affect you? 2019: Celebrate this 11-year-old drag queen, or you’re…

Sign of Hope  “In its most profound reality, love is essentially a gift; and conjugal love, while leading the spouses to the reciprocal “knowledge” which makes them “one flesh,” does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for…

When couples, by means of recourse to contraception, separate these two meanings that God the Creator has inscribed in the being of man and woman and in the dynamism of their sexual communion, they act as ‘arbiters’ of the Divine plan and they ‘manipulate’ and degrade human sexuality – and with it themselves and their…

Openness to Life is at the Center of True Development Solving the world’s problems – serious poverty, hunger, war, disease, etc. – is a complicated business, to say the least. To make even a tiny, lasting dent in a single one of these problems typically requires vast amounts of careful thinking, planning, research, money and…

Pro-Life Assault I am troubled by what appears to be a growing trend of violent attacks on peaceful pro-life activists. Perhaps the most famous recent instance was caught in a dramatic video last fall. The video shows a twenty-something-year-old man wearing a purple sweater, with a pentagram (a pagan symbol) on a necklace around his…

The State of the Faith in Europe and Easter Hope It is almost impossible not to find a dire symbolism in the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on the first day of Holy Week, the day after – as Ross Douthat points out – Catholics worldwide listened to a Gospel in which St.…