Advent Vespers - December 20 - "O Clavis David"

Five minutes of daily prayer and contemplation to better recognize the Christ Child and to more fully receive His boundless blessings. Based on the seven Great "O Antiphons."

Over 200,000 Lapsed Catholics Return to Church through 'Come Home' Outreach

From EWTN News

TV ads aimed at bringing lapsed Catholics back into the fold have enjoyed enormous success recently with an estimated 200,000 returning to churches throughout the U.S. as a result of the campaign. 

Featuring high-resolution TV ads with lush colors and powerful imagery, Catholics Come Home – an initiative of business entrepreneur Tom Peterson – has teamed up with local dioceses in the U.S. to bring people back into the Church.

Peterson told EWTN News Dec. 16 that Catholics Come Home “has been blessed with amazing results” over the last two and a half years as over 200,000 individuals, whether lapsed Catholics or otherwise, have joined their local parishes. 

The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom

'Net neutrality' sounds nice, but the Web is working fine now. The new rules will inhibit investment, deter innovation and create a billable-hours bonanza for lawyers.

From The Wall Street Journal

By Robert M. McDowell

Tomorrow morning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will mark the winter solstice by taking an unprecedented step to expand government's reach into the Internet by attempting to regulate its inner workings. In doing so, the agency will circumvent Congress and disregard a recent court ruling.

How did the FCC get here?

For years, proponents of so-called "net neutrality" have been calling for strong regulation of broadband "on-ramps" to the Internet, like those provided by your local cable or phone companies. Rules are needed, the argument goes, to ensure that the Internet remains open and free, and to discourage broadband providers from thwarting consumer demand. That sounds good if you say it fast.

Religious Practice on the Rise in Great Britain

The number of Anglican churches in Britain has risen for the first time in more than a decade, according to new research. 

From The Telegraph

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones

New congregations are being formed to take over old redundant church buildings or to provide more youth-friendly services, helping church membership numbers to rise.

The figures, to be published this week by Christian Research, also reveal that the Roman Catholic Church is continuing to enjoy a rise in attendance at Mass, that the number of Pentecostal worshippers is increasing rapidly and that Baptist churches are also enjoying a resurgence.

Advent Vespers - December 19 - "O Radix Jesse"

Five minutes of daily prayer and contemplation to better recognize the Christ Child and to more fully receive His boundless blessings. Based on the seven Great "O Antiphons."

Russia Poised to Control 50% of U.S. Uranium Output, FT Says

What does it mean when the U.S. President is an anti-American Marxist?  This:

From Bloomberg

By Alan Purkiss

ARMZ, the uranium-mining unit of Rosatom Corp., Russia’s state-owned nuclear-energy company, may soon control as much as half of U.S. uranium production, after U.S. authorities approved its purchase of 51 percent of Canada’s Uranium One Inc., the Financial Times reported. 

The purchase of the stake in Uranium One, which owns mines in Wyoming, was approved in October by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S. and last month by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the newspaper said. 

Eighty percent of uranium used in the U.S. is imported and Russia is one of the biggest suppliers; the uranium price has risen from $40 to $60 a pound since the summer, the FT said.

From the Pastor: Contemplation of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell . . .

A Weekly Column by Father George Rutler

As there would be no concept of darkness if all were light, no sense of vertical if all were horizontal, no notion of male if all were female, so would there be no intimation of separation from God if all were united with him. Because Christ is the Lord of Heaven, his warnings about Hell become more understandable, and because Christ is the Logos, the “Word” which holds all things together, his mysteries are perfectly logical, and among those mysteries is the state of separation from him.

Heaven is perfect “life” and the “state” of supreme, definitive happiness (Catechism, n. 1024). Logically, Hell is the opposite: imperfect life and the state of misery. Both are conditions and not places as we refer to geography in time and space. They are real, but cannot be located on any map, except by the longitude and latitude of the soul’s love for God. “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:18-19).

The cruelest people in history have tended to be extravagant sentimentalists, accepting flowers from children while they destroy infants, and glorifying mankind while despising men. The Prince of Lies is the definitive sentimentalist because he would have us live in a state of feeling instead of fact. He rejects the divine logic of Hell as the contradiction of Heaven and says they are the same. But logic wins in the end, as it did at the end of the twentieth century when the utopias of tyrants were exposed as earthly hells.

“Following the example of Christ, the Church warns the faithful of the ‘sad and lamentable reality of eternal death,’ also called ‘Hell.’ Hell’s principal punishment consists of eternal separation from God in whom alone man can have the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs” (Catechism, nn. 1056-57). In these “darkest days” of the year, the Light of the World begins to be seen, in order to “cast off the works of darkness” (Romans 13:12). Contemplation of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in the season of Advent, dignifies the human intellect by showing how to know the Christmas joy of the “Word Made Flesh,” not as amiable nostalgia, like Civil War battle re-enactments or dressing up like Washington crossing the Delaware, but actually realizing Heaven in that daily Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost which is the Holy Eucharist:

Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, Almighty Father, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Fr. George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, is available from Crossroads Publishing.