Huckabee Wins South Carolina County GOP Straw Poll

From Fox News

By L. A. Holmes

 

 Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has won a 2012 GOP presidential straw poll in the key early primary state of South Carolina.

Huckabee topped the York County Republican Party poll Saturday with 23 percent of first-choice votes according to the party, followed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 11 percent and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann at 10 percent.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney garnered eight percent of the 152 votes cast; Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Donald Trump each won seven percent.

The rest of field--including Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum--earned between one and four percent of the vote.

Half of the 149 convention attendees who voted on the issues ballot said that reducing government spending and reducing the size of government were the biggest concerns going into 2012.

'AdoroTe Devote' by Saint Thomas Aquinas

Devoutly I Adore Thee

O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

Sight, touch, and taste in Thee are each deceived;
The ear alone most safely is believed:
I believe all the Son of God has spoken,
Than Truth's own word there is no truer token.

God only on the Cross lay hid from view;
But here lies hid at once the Manhood too;
And I, in both professing my belief,
Make the same prayer as the repentant thief.

Thy wounds, as Thomas saw, I do not see;
Yet Thee confess my Lord and God to be:
Make me believe Thee ever more and more;
In Thee my hope, in Thee my love to store.

O thou Memorial of our Lord's own dying!
O Bread that living art and vivifying!
Make ever Thou my soul on Thee to live;
Ever a taste of Heavenly sweetness give.

O loving Pelican! O Jesu, Lord!
Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy Blood;
Of which a single drop, for sinners spilt,
Is ransom for a world's entire guilt.

Jesu! Whom for the present veil'd I see,
What I so thirst for, O vouchsafe to me:
That I may see Thy countenance unfolding,
And may be blest Thy glory in beholding. Amen.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by E. Caswall

From the Pastor - 'Faith Comes Through Hearing'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

Christ Healing the Blind Man

Eustache Le Sueur (1616-1655)

The Gospel account of the man born blind (John 9:1-41), speaks of hearing four times. Liturgically, it is not appropriate, save for reasons of hearing loss, for the faithful to read the Scriptures from some text as the lector is reading them. Such individualism is alien to Catholic sensibility. The Living Word said to His disciples, “Let him who has ears to hear, hear” (Mark 4:9). He did not say, “Let him who has eyes to read, read.” The Word of God is not literature. His voice makes a personal contact. At the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene could see the Lord, but she recognized Him only when He spoke her name, and Cleopas and his companion saw Him on the Emmaus road, but their hearts were moved when He “opened” the meaning of the Scriptures to them, and they recognized Him only when He broke bread.

Jesus is not content with giving the blind man physical sight. Of course, He deals with the pedantry of the Pharisees like someone flicking a gnat, but His attention is toward that man who suddenly can see with his eyes, but needs yet to see with his soul.

At the behest of Pope Gregory X, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote his glorious Eucharistic lines so that they might be heard: Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur; Sed auditu solo tuto creditur. “Taste and touch and vision, to discern thee fail / Faith that comes through hearing pierces through the veil.” (From Adoro te devote.)
     

One discipline of Lent should be to unplug the I-Pods, turn off the television, and listen for the Voice. It is easier to be aware that something is hard to see than hard to hear. But the Voice is all important, and explains what the eye may see but does not understand.

The salvific suffering of Jesus began when Philip and Andrew told Him that there were Greeks who wanted to see Him (John 12:21). We do not know what those Greeks made of Him when they saw Jesus. Just as hearing is not listening, so seeing is not perceiving. The virtue of Faith transforms the physical sensation into a moral fact. So our Lord said to His apostle in Easter: “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed” (John 20:29). As the soul understands Christ through the heart, the cure needed is not for hardness of hearing, but hardness of heart. When the human heart wills what God wills, then blindness and deafness both are cured. Having given sight to the blind man, Jesus asked him if he believed in the Son of Man. The man did not know what that meant. So the Voice spoke: “You have seen Him, and it is He who speaks to you.” In that moment the man born blind understood and worshiped Him, “Lord, I believe” (John 9:35-38).

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Cloud of Witnesses: Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, is available from Crossroads Publishing.

Obama Ready to Seek Another 4 Year Vacation Package

President Barack Obama could officially launch his campaign for re-election in 2012 as early as Monday, according to reports in Washington.

 

From The Telegraph

By Philip Sherwell

Obama confidants told The Wall Street Journal that the president is expected to make the announcement to supporters and then embark on a series of high-profile fund-raisers across the country.

The Intellectual as Courtier

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

By Paul A. Rahe

Throughout history, intellectuals have been linked to tyrants, says the historian Paul A. Rahe. Here, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi (left) listens during a debate on democracy with the British sociologist Anthony Giddens (far right) and the American political scientist Benjamin Barber.

What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant's notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).

But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.

Pierce Brosnan Talks About His Deep Catholic Faith

From Free Republic

Pierce Brosnan admits that he might not have learned all he needed to know about math from the Christian Brothers in Ireland, but the teachers imparted one thing that has stayed with him to this day – his Catholic faith.

In an interesting new interview with RTE.ie to promote his patronage of the new Irish dramatic art academy The Lir, which will debut this fall at Trinity College in Dublin, Brosnan credits the power of prayer with guiding him through life’s ups and downs.

"(Prayer) helped me with the loss of my wife to cancer and with a child who had fallen on tough times. Now prayer helps me to be a father, to be an actor and to be a man,” Brosnan told the Irish website.

“It always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something and for me that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith.”

Pierce’s first wife, Cassandra Harris, died of ovarian cancer 20 years ago. The son they had together, Sean, was in a serious car crash a few years back in California, but luckily he survived and is thriving again.

Brosnan and his mother left his hometown of Navan, Co. Meath in 1964, when he was 12 years old, for greener pastures in London. His father left the family when he was only two, so times were tough.

"In a way (my life) all leads back to a little boy in Navan, my home town on the banks of the Boyne.

Sometimes, it has been painted in melodramatic tones but it was a fantastic way to be brought up. The Catholicism and the Christian brothers, those are deep-rooted images and the foundation for a person of some acting skill,” he says.

"God has been good to me. My faith has been good to me in the moments of deepest suffering, doubt and fear. It is a constant, the language of prayer … I might not have got my sums right from the Christian Brothers or might not have got the greatest learning of literature from them but I certainly got a strapping amount of faith."

Brosnan also feels that faith will help the Irish people escape the gloom and doom of recession.

"But there is one thing that the people of Ireland know how to do and that is to survive. You have to keep your faith and stay optimistic,” he feels.Brosnan spent a good chunk of time in New York in January filming his co-starring part in I Don’t Know How She Does It with Sarah Jessica Parker. It’s due for a September 16 release, courtesy of the Weinstein Company.

Daughters of Mary - 'God of Mercy and Compassion'

A Lenten hymn sung beautifully by the Daughers of Mary, Mother of Our Savior.