MADAME RESTELL: THE LIFE, DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF OLD NEW YORK’S MOST FABULOUS, FEARLESS AND INFAMOUS ABORTIONIST

  by Jennifer Wright (Hachette books, New York, 2023, 334 pp.) Reviewed by Maria McFadden Maffucci ________________________________________________ Crawling through this “pop history” book on Madame Restell brought to mind “The Piranha Brothers,” a memorable skit from the...
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God Sees Her

  “Truly here I have seen him who looks after me” (Genesis 16:13). Recently, I was speaking to a friend over lunch, a woman who has given herself to what we might call the issues of life, particularly abortion and euthanasia/assisted suicide. Speaking of our culture’s...
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IN MEMORY OF SENATOR JAMES LANE BUCKLEY

  James Lane Buckley died August 18, having passed his 100th birthday last March. The soft-spoken Buckley catapulted to national prominence in November 1970 when, against expectations, he won a U.S. Senate seat from New York on the Conservative Party line, beating out a pair...
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Rested and Ready

  Summer is a good time to reflect upon Our Lord’s words to his busy disciples: “‘Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat.” (Mark 6:31) This reminds me of how the Marine Staff Sergeant...
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The Washington Post’s accidentally pro-life feature

    Last year, the Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener profiled a teenage couple who had twins after Texas’ heartbeat abortion law went into effect. The article ran days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, supposedly heralding the oppressive new regime...
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The Living and the Dead

  It is sultry summer in Japan. There are fireworks displays in the night sky as I walk home from work, distant orbs of shattering ochre and turquoise exploding in the distance followed by a dull thud. In nearby parks and schoolyards, I hear the taut rhythms of taik...
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The Speech Police is After Pregnancy Centers

Few things bother pro-abortion advocates more than the idea that pro-life pregnancy centers dissent from their party line. Some new laws that have recently been enacted show how far they are willing to go. Casting aside any notion of free speech and free thought, they are now...
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Pro-Life as Promise, Not Pageant

    “That’s what I’m talking about.” English dictionaries cite this phrase as an idiom for approval, satisfaction, and vindication: Prior words or actions may have been inadequate, but this at last is how I want things to be. Because the pro-life movement has a political...
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Transfiguration and Hiroshima

  At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber dropped the world’s first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The explosion killed an estimated one hundred thousand people. John Hersey, a journalist who had been...
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Pro-life Is Not Anti-death

  Caring for the sick: It’s what Christians do and have done since the beginning. Jesus healed the sick. Insofar as they could, his followers did the same. And whenever they could not heal, they stayed with the sick and did not abandon them. Caring for the sick leads to...
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