One of the editorial choices I’ve made here at 1P5 is not to open the site up to prayer requests for publication. The reason is that so many of us are in need of prayers so much of the time that it would be impossible to actually respond to all the requests. (I’m working on…
Now is the time to defend marriage and family. We are still feeling the effects of Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade, with the widespread use and acceptance of contraception and the propensity to resort to abortion when the contraception fails. Although reports tell us that abortion numbers are down, we know that we…
I received an email this morning from John J. O’Sullivan (full disclosure – John is a friend of mine) who attended the rally yesterday evening in Manhattan to save the icons at The Church of Our Saviour. He reports: There was a small rag-tag group of Catholics who stood in front of the residence of Cardinal Dolan.…
There’s a very peculiar thing happening at The Church of Our Savior in Midtown Manhattan. Beautiful sacred art — icons commissioned in 2004 by Fr. George Rutler, the parish’s erudite and well-loved former pastor — have been disappearing from the columns surrounding the sanctuary – quite literally under the cover of night. This clandestine desecration of the holy of holies —…
When I was about ten years old, I came across a story in a Catholic magazine about the secretive inner workings of a Satanic Mass. The specific incident described involved a sort of ritual torture of some teenagers as part of the ceremony, and it detailed the gruesome things they were forced to consume from the chalice and…
Say what you like about Fox News–and I should confess that opinions among my Catholic friends are mixed at best–they have a much greater proportion of Christians among their broadcasters and journalists than any other major network. Among other things, this in part leads them to do things no other network would. Here is Brit Hume,…
In the 1976 classic satirical film “Network”, television anchorman Howard Beale (brilliantly played by Peter Finch in an Oscar winning performance) exhorts his viewing audience to lose their apathy and to get angry about the state of affairs in the country: “I want you to get up right now. Sit up. Go to your windows.…
Bishop Johan Bonny was back in the news last week following his selection by the Vatican as a participant at the upcoming Synod on the Family in Rome. Bishop Bonny, you may recall, said the following back in December: “We have to look inside the Church for a formal recognition of the kind of interpersonal…
There are times where an important spiritual concept is lost in the marketplace of religious ideas, subdued and modified by pop psychologists and religionists seeking simple solutions rather than lasting challenges. The concept of “acedia,” if mentioned at all, is often grouped with negative emotions, depressive states, and feelings of underachievement. Jean-Charles Nault’s (O.S.B.) The…
If you’re a Catholic and you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen the sponsored posts. If you’re a person living in the DC Metro area, you’ve probably heard the radio ads, seen the posters at bus stops, or maybe even the full-page ad in the Washington Post. These ads, from a San Francisco-based non profit called the…
I don’t know what God has in mind here, but there has been an unnervingly close series of parallels between the popes and the U.S. presidents, at least since World War II. The following eerie coincidences between papal and presidential reigns strikes me as somehow significant. Make of them what you will… [one_half padding=”0px 20px…
