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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…
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The statesman is an easy man,he tells his lies by rote;The journalist makes up his liesand takes you by the throat. ― William Butler Yeats, “The Old Stone Cross.” My wife Kathy and I remember our pro-life activism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Oregon. It didn’t take us long to become attuned to grossly…
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The short answer is no, remarriage after annulment is morally permissable. The Catholic Church does not acknowledge divorce. In the Catholic mindset, marriage is not merely contractual, but sacramental. It is a permanent spiritual union formed by God, and it makes no more sense to speak of a couple becoming un-married than of a person…
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Humanae Vitae (On Human Life) is Pope Paul VI’s famed 1968 encyclical on contraception and reproductive ethics. Written in light of a study commissioned by the Vatican on modern reproductive issues, its timing coincided with the sudden prevalence of contraception and concerns about overpopulation in society at large. Pope Paul VI’s writings reaffirmed long-held Church…
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Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God…. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being. ~ Catechism of the Catholic Church In other words,…
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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.…
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Marriage is fraught with countless challenges: home ownership, finances, children, jobs, navigating the good days and the bad, and sometimes even just getting along. Being married to your best friend—someone who shares your likes and dislikes—is a blessing and makes life fun and exciting. Even your differences can be fun. Maybe her prankster personality makes…
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Wake Up to the Threat A so-called “human rights tribunal” in Canada has just ruled that a Christian activist must pay $55,000 to a provincial politician because he referred to this politician as a “biological male” in a political pamphlet. The politician in question, Morgane Oger (born Ronan Oger), is a biological male. However, he…
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“[T]he value of life can today undergo a kind of “eclipse”, even though conscience does not cease to point to it as a sacred and inviolable value, as is evident in the tendency to disguise certain crimes against life in its early or final stages by using innocuous medical terms which distract attention from the…
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The Beauty of Catholic Marriage Is remarrying after divorce a sin? To answer this question from a Catholic viewpoint, we must first understand what marriage is. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines marriage as “the matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life…
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