Witold Pilecki: The Incredible Story of the Hero Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Woman Turns to Facebook to Search for Late Husband's Car for Her Son

Jessica Rozier and her son Justin from Moore, Texas, turned to Facebook to look for an old '99 Toyota Celica owned by Justin's father, who was killed in Iraq. They posted a message with the VIN asking for help, and strangers took notice. Steve Hartman met up with them, On The Road.

La Chapelle Royale - "In Paradisum" - Gabriel Fauré

In paradisum deducant te angeli, in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et c__ Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem.

May the angels lead you into paradise, may the martyrs receive you in your coming, and may they guide you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the chorus of angels receive you and with Lazarus once poor may you have eternal rest.

Father Rutler: The Russian Revolution

Fr. George Rutler Celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989 was awkward and unlike our nation’s festivities of 1976, because the American Revolution did not have a Reign of Terror. The Russian people are in a situation even more perplexing when it comes to the one-hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7. (The dating confusion is because Russia was still on the old Julian calendar in 1917.) The Russian Revolution unleashed the horrors of Communism that led to the deaths of at least 94 million people in various countries, by genocide, execution, purges and famines caused by collectivization.  History is not ardently pursued in our schools these days, and when it is modified as Social Science, it often distorts historical reality. In a survey of youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, twenty-eight per cent had never heard of Lenin, and fully half had never heard of Stalin, while nearly two-thirds were unaware of the existence of history’s worst mass murderer (65 million deaths), Mao Tse-Tung. The death of Fidel Castro was marked by many media commentators as something to be mourned, and Che Guevara appears on t-shirts as a chic hero. In countries at least nominally Christian, the assaults on the Church by revolutionaries took a more subtle form through subversion. There is the witness of Bella Dodd, an organizer of the Communist Party in the United States and head of the New York State Teachers Union. After her return to the Church in 1952 under the guidance of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, she detailed how the Communist Party in the 1920’s and 1930’s strove to infiltrate American seminaries and other church institutions, often through the exploitation of the naïve and what, according to Soviet expert Vladimir Bukovsky, Lenin had called “useful idiots.” There still are Russians old enough to remember seeing priests nailed to the doors of their churches. Their nation remains conflicted about their revolution, and still hesitant about what to do with the repeatedly embalmed corpse of Lenin; but facing his tomb from across the great square, Krásnaya plóshchad, is the Kazan Cathedral, restored in 1993. On its façade is written in bold Cyrillic letters: “Christ is Risen.” Since the “Second Baptism of Russia” when the old Soviet Union fell in 1988, 29,000 churches have been built there, at the rate of three per day. In that period the number of seminaries has increased from three to over fifty. That is a picture far different from many places in the West, where innocuous Christianity has failed to resist the bacillus of secularism, as churches close and seminaries shrink. People who have suffered the consequences of evil in the East have expressions more ponderous and sober than the chuckling countenances of soft spokesmen for Christ in the West. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should be a time for reflection and resolve.

Barbara Bonney - "Pie Jesu" - Gabriel Fauré

Ex-Bishops’ Doctrine Chief Says Darkness Coming to Light Under Francis

Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy, a former chief of staff for the U.S. Bishops' Committee on Doctrine and a current member of the Vatican's International Theological Commission, has written Pope Francis to say the pontiff is causing "chronic confusion," appointing bishops who "scandalize" the faithful, and prompting ordinary Catholics to "lose confidence in their supreme shepherd."

A former chief of staff for the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, and a current member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, has written Pope Francis to say that his pontificate “has given those who hold harmful theological and pastoral views the license and confidence to come into the light and expose their previously hidden darkness,” which, one day, will have to be corrected.

While expressing loyalty to Francis as the “Vicar of Christ on earth, the shepherd of his flock,” Capuchin Father Thomas Weinandy nevertheless charges that the pope is:

• Fostering “chronic confusion.”
• “Demeaning” the importance of doctrine.
• Appointing bishops who “scandalize” believers with dubious “teaching and pastoral practice.”
• Giving prelates who object the impression they’ll be “marginalized or worse” if they speak out.
• Causing faithful Catholics to “lose confidence in their supreme shepherd.”

“In recognizing this darkness, the Church will humbly need to renew itself, and so continue to grow in holiness,” Weinandy wrote in the letter, which is dated July 31, the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the pope’s Jesuit order.

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The Solemnity of All Saints - "For All the Saints" - Choir of King's College, Cambridge

A recording of the great Vaughan Williams tune (SINE NOMINE) by the Choir of King's College, Cambridge.