“America’s system of checks and balances ensures the Supreme Court’s misguided decision will not be the final word on President Obama’s government takeover of the healthcare system. Although the Court failed to provide a much-needed check on federal power, we have every bit of confidence the American people and their elected representatives will.
“Indeed, since the debate began in August 2009, Americans have vocally opposed President Obama’s approach to health care, which remains unaffordable and irresponsible. As such, Congress must repeal the law in its entirety.”
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI has approved the heroic virtues of U.S. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, clearing the way for the advancement of his sainthood cause.
The announcement June 28 came just over 13 months after Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of Peoria, Ill., presented Pope Benedict XVI with two thick volumes about the life of Archbishop Sheen, whose home diocese was Peoria.
The decree from the Congregation for Saints' Causes, signed by Pope Benedict, said Archbishop Sheen heroically lived Christian virtues and was "venerable." Before he can be beatified, the Vatican must recognize that a miracle has occurred through his intercession.
Archbishop Sheen, who was born in Illinois in 1895 and died in New York in 1979, was an Emmy-winning televangelist. His program, "Life is Worth Living," aired in the United States from 1951 to 1957.
Last September, a tribunal of inquiry was sworn in to investigate the alleged miraculous healing of a newborn whose parents prayed to the intercession of Archbishop Sheen.
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| Supreme Knight Carl Anderson. Credit: Knights of Columbus. |
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| Gary Glenn |
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| Nikki Haley was "TEA Party" when it served her ambitions. |
Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in.
A man in full and a man for our season, Thomas More (1478-1535) has intrigued generations of writers and thinkers, citizens and statesmen alike. William Shakespeare, for example, wrote of More as living justice "for truth's sake and his conscience," while Jonathan Swift numbered Thomas More among the six greatest defenders of liberty and claimed that More was "the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced." In the twentieth century, Winston Churchill admired "the noble and heroic stand" of More's last years, and GK Chesterton wrote that More "may come to be counted the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history." How did one free and educated man make an impact like this, on his own country and across the centuries, such that he would be canonized on the eve of the second world war, named Lawyer of the Millennium in 1999, and finally proclaimed Patron of Statesmen at the beginning of the third millennium? This talk will offer ten counsels from Thomas More on statesmanship and the needs of the present moment.
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| Despots and heirs of Valerian and Diocletian |
It is this two-class system that the administration has embedded in federal law via the February 15, 2012, publication of the final rules providing for an exemption from the mandate for a narrowly defined set of “religious employers” and the related administration publications and statements about a different “accommodation” for non-exempt religious organizations.
And yet both worship-oriented and service-oriented religious organizations are authentically and equally religious organizations. To use Christian terms, we owe God wholehearted and pure worship, to be sure, and yet we know also that “pure religion” is “to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27). We deny that it is within the jurisdiction of the federal government to define, in place of religious communities, what constitutes true religion and authentic ministry.
" All Marxists are liars. Marxists have to be liars; being a liar is virtually a definitive characteristic of being a Marxist. It is a requirement. The ultimate goal of the Marxist is to move all of society toward or into Communism; that 'worthy' goal is the supposedly noble 'End' that justifies, in the mind of the Marxist, any 'Means' at all that may be applied to achieve it."
A new biography of Barack Obama has
established that his grandfather was not, as is related in the
President’s own memoir, detained by the British in Kenya and found that
claims that he was tortured were a fabrication.
“The entry into force of the U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012, means countless new opportunities for U.S. exporters to sell more made-in-America goods, services and agricultural products to Korean customers — and to support more good jobs here at home.” "The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with 'communism' or 'socialism'." - Catechism of the Catholic Church 2425
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| Gary Glenn |
shops of the United States have called for daily prayer leading up to the 4th of July to safeguard freedom of religion in our country. That freedom is tenuous these days. There seems to be a conscious attempt by the federal government, in speech after speech, to replace freedom of religion with freedom of worship. That is not as subtle as it seems, for while permitting ritual acts of devotion within the walls of a building, it would limit the right to express one's religious beliefs in public discourse. This applies to everything from displaying religious symbols to preaching and publishing outside the confines of a house of worship. In Orwellian semantics, soon enough even the commandment to love the sinner but hate the sin becomes “hate speech.” There are some religions, like some governments, that intrinsically are hostile to freedom of religion. Recently, a Christian in Tunisia was martyred for converting from Islam, and his killers chanted prayers against “polytheists” as they call Christians, while slowly slicing off his head. While this happens frequently, our own federal government and much of the media are conspicuously silent, for while they may not be interested in religious creeds, they demur from what the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom called “immunity from coercion in civil society.” |
| Father Harry Entwistle |
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| King John of England |
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According to Gallup, President John F. Kennedy garnered 78 percent of the Catholic vote. |
From National Review Online
By Michael Novak
The new wisdom is that Catholics vote just like everybody else. That purported wisdom isn’t wise.
The Catholic vote differs in four decisive ways from the Protestant, Jewish, and secular votes.
(1) The Catholic vote is concentrated mainly in the largest states in the Electoral College: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey.
(2) A larger proportion of Catholics than of any other religious group except Jews votes regularly, every election. In some jurisdictions (Chicago, Boston) Catholic voters have been known to vote at a rate of 104 percent or more when necessary, some of them after their natural deaths.
(3) In some key states, the Catholic vote, although tending more Democratic, is fairly evenly split between the Democrats and the Republicans. Keeping the Catholic vote for the Democrat down even to 52 percent may be enough to get a Republican elected.
And (4) — most important of all — in many states Catholic voters frequently swing between parties by margins of 3 to 6 percent. And even more in some years.
As political professionals know well, each swinger counts twice. Each takes a vote away from one column and puts it into the other. If on a national basis the 25 million Catholic votes (24 percent of all votes cast) swing by 1 million votes toward Romney and away from Obama, that gives Romney a net gain of 2 million votes in relation to his competitor, and Obama a net loss of 2 million. This year it seems more likely to be a swing of 2 million for Romney, a net loss to Obama of 4 million. And it may be even a larger swing, depending on how powerful the broad-based campaign to protect religious liberty turns out to be.
The historical record of these large swings helps to explain why the Catholic vote has gone with the winning side in so many elections since 1952. Put another way, the Catholic swing vote has more than any other decided the winner, just because it is of such significant numbers. No Democrat since 1952 (except for Clinton in 1992) has ever won the White House without a majority of the Catholic vote.
In some states, as noted above, Republicans do not have to win a majority of the Catholic vote to carry the state; they need only hold down the Democratic Catholic majority by two or three percentage points. In Pennsylvania, my home state, the rule among professionals was that if the Catholic vote for the Democrat could be held down to 52 percent, the Republican could take the state.
Percentage of Catholic Vote for Presidential Winners
1952: Eisenhower, 44%
1956: Eisenhower, 49%
1960: Kennedy, 78%
1964: Johnson, 76%
1968: Nixon, 33%
1972: Nixon, 52%
1976: Carter, 57%
1980: Reagan, 47%
1984: Reagan, 61%
1988: Bush, 49%
1992: Clinton, 47%
1996: Clinton, 55%
2000: Bush, 46%
2004: Bush, 48%
2008: Obama, 53%
(The figures above are from Gallup. In the three-way race of 1968, Nixon lost the Catholic vote to Hubert Humphrey by a margin of 59 percent to 33 percent, but managed to squeak out a victory, since much of the Southern Protestant vote went to George Wallace. In 1972, however, Mr. Nixon’s 52 percent broke the Democratic lock on the Catholic vote.)
Finally, it may be that in some years a particular factor affects a significant slice of Catholic voters more than most others — the chance to elect the first Catholic president in 1960, for instance.
And Catholics tend to identify themselves as Catholics long after they have ceased going to church (“born Catholic” or “non-practicing Catholic,” these tend to qualify their identity). The difference in voting patterns between Catholics who go to Mass at least weekly and those who don’t is in some matters (partial-birth abortion, e.g.) unusually large. In 2012, I expect the defense of religious liberty to cut as deeply against Obama as 3 million Catholic voters or more. Worth watching.
Michael Novak is distinguished visiting professor at Ave Maria University and co-author, with Jana Novak, of Washington’s God.
By Patrick J. Buchanan 
