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It's the incoherence of the faithful and the pastors that undermines the witness of the Church. The apostles were simple people but they were not afraid of anything or anyone. Those were the concepts at the center of Pope Francis homily during the Mass at the Church of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The words of Francis are a challenge to the flock to grow in courage and faithfulness. We are called to be generous in presenting the faith to the world boldly. In a world growing hostile to Christian that means we may have to run the risk of losing our life.

It was a nice sunny day in Buenos Aires, but a little cold for the season since it is still summer here down under. I told many friends the night before that I was expecting the Pope to be elected on the 13th since that day of the month was chosen by Our Blessed Mother to crown the first twelve days of prayer. Mary, Mystical Rose, Queen of Priests is remembered that day every month of the year. The sight of a puff of white smoke coming from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney confirmed my hunch and then came the great surprise: our own Archbishop of Buenos Aires had been whisked away by the Romans and was now Pope Francis.

It seems like yesterday when the news of the abdication of our beloved Benedict shocked the world. It was the day of the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, February 11. I think that was a significant date, pregnant with all kinds of meaning and definitely a Marian date. The news came to me as I sat at my computer early in the morning, Buenos Aires time. The "Pope Resigns!" titles woke me up completely before I could take the first sip of my morning coffee. I started making quick calculations. A glance at the calendar revealed the 13th day of March as a possible date for something big. You already know that the 13th of each month is the day of the Mystical Rose, Our Lady Queen of Priests. Since the priesthood in the Church is in sore need of healing these days, it seemed natural (or rather super-natural) that a new Pope, a Marian Pope, would be called to lead the Holy See.

I have been thinking for some time that a distorted vision of history is necessary if one wants to control the masses with a distorted narrative. The idea of presenting the destiny of mankind as a one way road to Station Y depends heavily, in my opinion, of making the fools believe they come from Station X. That’s how we got the Marxist view of History as a social struggle, or the story of some sects that place themselves in the position of restoring something that never existed. They can present their invented past to their believers through the steamy window of their concocted story. A controlled future always requires an artificial past.

Since accusations against the Church and Christianity in general are common and frequent, I thought it would be useful to write a response to a letter I received recently. Forgive the extension of my response, but it is important to expose every logical fault and every historical error to make sure that we get as close to the truth as possible. I shall strive to do so. To keep the response reasonably ordered I will group the concepts exposed in this letter to answer them one by one. I will begin by defining some concepts that seem unclear to the author. The original letter entitled "Response to Laboring for Beauty" is printed verbatim in the footnotes. [1] It seems to have been lifted almost in its entirety from www.secularhumanism.org but we shall respond to it anyway.

Antonio Carlos Jobim, the celebrated Brazilian composer, complained in an interview given not long before his death in 1994: "We are building a desert." He was referring to the general state of the world at the time. Looking at the results of many decades of increasingly secular culture I cannot agree more with Mr. Jobim. The stubborn insistence of the liberal political forces to erase God and religion from public life has produced bitter fruits throughout the years: Thousands of human lives are lost to abortion every day. Terrorism is rampant. Embittered youths roam the streets of European cities setting cars on fire and shouting "No law!". (They could be the grandsons of other angry young men who declared "God is dead" about half a century ago.) Liberal capitalism and the forces of globalization wreak havoc in economies around the world. Millions have passed from living modest productive lives to the horrors of abject poverty in just a few years. The menace of pandemics, catastrophic climate changes and unstoppable social unrest are met with volumes of futile laws passed by weak and fractured political forces. As the concept of God is pushed further and further away from the center of culture and society, chaos ensues. Many believe we are living in prophetic times.

I enjoyed reading The Coming Age of the Laity by Christopher Manion, and I would like to add one small thing that may be useful. Far from me to even compare myself to a writer and thinker of that caliber, I am only adding my two cents or rather two cents that I found along the way while catechizing myself.

Unexpected things happen all the time but certain things have the power to convey a message to the collective psyche of a nation. Less frequently there are events that can alter the course of human affairs on a planetary scale. The killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand that ushered a century of unspeakable violence was one of those events. Certainly not the first crowned head of Europe to succumb to the dagger or the bullet, the case of Francis Ferdinand still remains a classic example of how a random and apparently inconsequential event can become the catalyst unleashing forces beyond human control. Francis and his wife Duchess Sophie were the first victims of the Great War that was to claim thirty five million more casualties in and out of the battlefields of the world. The death of Ferdinand and Sophie was a fitting metaphor for the end of the old European order that they represented so well.

Sex Addiction Among Women Real and Growing. Now that I have your attention, I’d like to say that I don’t believe that headline, which recently appeared online. At least I don’t believe that sex addiction among any group is “growing.” I do believe, however, that some women — and some men – are genuinely addicted to sex.

First, let’s address sexual addiction and then, I’ll end by saying why I don’t think the incidence of this addiction is “growing.” The latter is a somewhat less intriguing topic and if I wrote it about it first, you might stop reading now.

Why have not the moral forces of the nation, such as education, press, radio, all the clergy of all denominations, the social reformers, been more insistent on developing a new order instead of patching up the old one? Perhaps the principal reason is because they have been getting behind certain movements instead of ahead of them. The first thought that comes to a particular group which wishes to further legislation in its favor is to wire educators, clergymen, actors, and social workers, to lend their names as sponsors of its cause - and there are at least five hundred such professional signers in our country who keep their fountain pens uncapped for just such demented and cheap publicity. It is just this irrational mentality which substitutes imitation for thinking by pushing some group or class instead of leading for the common good, that has paralyzed the regeneration of society.

A few generations ago it was the fashion to get behind Capitalism, and political parties were formed to support its legislation. Now it is the fashion and mood to get behind Labor which develops its own parties, while John Q. Public and the common good is like ground meat in the sandwich. Each class demands its rights in the name of freedom, forgetting that, as Lincoln once said, "Sheep and wolves never agree on the definition of freedom."

How does one measure whether a life was a success, or a failure?

Some would measure it by recognition, that is, how many knew the person’s name. For others, the measure of a successful life would be the amount of wealth accumulated, or possessions held. Still others would say a life was successful if the person made a major contribution to society — in medicine, sports, politics, or the arts.

By that standard my brother, Marshall Stephen Thomas, who died January 5, was a failure. If, however, your standard for a successful life is how that life positively touched others, then my brother’s life was a resounding success.

Shortly after he was born in 1950, Marshall was diagnosed with Down syndrome. Some in the medical community referred to the intellectually disabled as “retarded” back then, long before the word became a common schoolyard epithet. His doctors told our parents he would never amount to anything and advised them to place him in an institution. Back then, this was advice too often taken by parents who were so embarrassed about having a disabled child that they often refused to take them out in public.

Doctors treating people for depression should delve into the childhoods of their patients before prescribing, because a history of mistreatment has a significant impact on their illness and ability to recover, scientists said on Monday.

Researchers who conducted a combined analysis of 26 studies involving more than 23,000 people found that those who suffered maltreatment as children were twice as likely as those who had normal childhoods to develop persistent and recurrent depression -- one of the world's most common and costly mental illnesses.

Those who had stressful or abusive childhoods were also less likely to be helped with drug or psychological treatment, the analysis found, suggesting doctors and scientists should look for new kinds of treatments and ways of intervening earlier.

Is religion a force for good? That's the subject of a long-awaited debate tonight between the former PM and one of the world's leading secularists. We asked two leading writers to set out the rival arguments in advance. Christopher Hitchens, one of the world's leading secularists and former PM Tony Blair will debate in Toronto. [NOTE: the debate took place during November 2010. I am interested in revisiting the analysis of their arguments as presented a few days prior to the actual debate.]

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher said: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” There was a United States of Europe once. It was called Christendom. Sometime after Thomas Aquinas finished his Summa Europe began to change from pursuing things eternal to pursuing things temporal: to the enjoyment of the material riches created by centuries of Christian order. In time that change reached the core of the European spirit. The German Reformation arrived and challenged the ancient vision of the Church, the nature of authority, the purpose of obedience.

We pay a lot of lip service to our ancient doctrines but many are not living in the faith of the Fathers these days. I like the quote by St. Bernard de Clairvaux at the opening of today's Insight Scoop: "Some seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curiosity. Others seek knowledge that they may themselves be known: that is vanity. But there are still others who seek knowledge in order to serve and edify others, and that is charity."

There is a group out there that decided long ago that the shortest path to become an "intellectual" is to be an atheist. Some of them are inexplicably politically Conservative. How can a person be Conservative and yet not believe in normative values or a higher order is something hard to conceive. Yet one of those geniuses here slaps the whole community of believers labeling them schizophrenics (see second quote below.) This is a good moment to quote one of the basic principles of Conservatism:

These days government insists in having programs to take care of anyone that could possibly be in need of help. The natural result of all that preoccupation with the needy has resulted in a multiplication of both the number of needy people and the number of needs that have to be addressed. Programs for the needy proliferate as fast as the needy themselves. There seems to be a correlation between the growth of government and the growth of needy people. I sure wonder if government is not creating a market for its own products but I digress. Someone recently told me that his interpretation of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church was that actually Caesar is in charge of mending all the social ills that individuals, families, and the Church cannot address.

The ... conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest. Russell Kirk

Do not be misled: Randian objectivism is not a conservative option, much less a Catholic option.

Objectivism supporters are everywhere these days filling the airwaves with their fluff. They follow Ayn Rand’s technique of presenting a ridiculous straw man, then their position. They sometimes present some false option like the one espoused here: Sanger or Rand a preposterous option like Himmler or Hitler (whom both Sanger and Rand admired.)

This follows the thread from Father John Corapi and the State of Due Process for Accused Priests in Catholic Lane where the comments have been closed. There you will find a comment by K. M. Tierney that asked for my response. Here is Tierney's comment and my response below. It seems to me that Mr. Tierney really wants John Corapi to be guilty but the way things are going either Corapi is innocent or he is the dumbest megalomaniac the Church has seen lately. I am inclined and I hope for the first.

Father John Corapi has apparently resigned himself to live his faith outside the priestly ministry. I just read his good-bye letter and I must say that I sympathize with him. I share with him the same experience with the only difference that -unlike Father John- frankly I don’t care.

Corapi is not the first to experience this kind of persecution. Padre Pio was accused in almost the same exact way when he was about the age of Fr. Corapi. I have read Padre Pio’s biographies (there is more than one) and I can see that this is a systemic problem.

Many years ago when I was barely twenty years old I witnessed the spectacular arrest of a man right in front of my house. A car moving down my street was suddenly surrounded by four unmarked police cars, the driver was brutally dragged out of his vehicle, and his beautiful German shepherd was shot dead while still in the back seat. At the time I was dragging a guitar amplifier out the lobby of the apartment building I lived in. I hit the floor when I heard the shots and I witnessed the whole thing from behind the amp's speaker box. It all lasted but a few minutes. Several men with rifles and pistols formed a circle around the cars, looked around menacingly while brandishing their arms making sure that everyone got the message to stay silent. The five cars drove away and traffic resumed. A pair of broken eyeglasses remained as a silent witness of the violent scene we had just seen.

Another week, another dozen or so images of Weenie the Tweeter in various states of disrobe. I can only imagine the suffering of the poor wife, the humiliation of the family and friends at the sight of this debacle. Yet there is something worse than that. The poor guy wants to keep his job as a US Representative for New York. As long as he holds that position we are supposed to address him as “the Honorable.” Talk about irony!

The U.S. government published the latest unemployment statistics today. Unrevised figures indicate a very high number of workers were laid off for the first time. That is the latest in a series of reports clearly showing that the "stimulus" is not helping the American working class with the same effectiveness it helped banks and Wall Street firms.

I needed to write something to post in my new website and I thought I could begin with a simple reflection on beauty. At first the concept is difficult to define. Instinctively I feel that beauty is real to everyone. Once I have made my mind that something is beautiful I know it in the same sense that I know what the number one is. The natural number does not represent something: one is simply one. Beauty seems to appeal to that same area of our nature, that part that is connected both to the instinctive and the rational.