Pope Francis, Pets, Babies . . . and God

Pope Francis has been widely criticized for comments he made last week about young couples choosing pets over children: We see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more. And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have...
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Abortion, the Hunger for Heaven and Thomas Hardy

Whenever we think of the forces arrayed against the pro-life cause—and they can sometimes seem rather formidable, especially when we take into account that they include what St. John Henry Cardinal Newman nicely referred to as the “aboriginal calamity” of original sin—we must...
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Innocents Then and Now

Bleak and brutal. These words come to mind today—December 28, the Feast of the Holy Innocents—when the Church remembers the children who were murdered in what the poet John Donne calls “Herod’s jealous general doom” (“La Corona”). Of course, no words, poetic or prophetic, can...
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Before You Were a Twinkle in Your Father’s Eye

The other night while dial-surfing on FM radio for some music, I came upon a talk-radio guest sputtering excitedly: “The people behind the 15-week ban on abortion in Mississippi are trying to change the definition of viability!” The nerve! Not only an assault on abortion rights...
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The Roe v. Wade Deception

Abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, under all circumstances, in every state, and Americans are not allowed to vote on it. That is what the Supreme Court mandated when it handed down the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Furthermore, the Supreme Court justices...
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A “Saint” of the Sumo World

In a recent Human Life Review blog (https://humanlifereview.com/wrestling-with-life-issues-in-japan/) I wrote about a loutish sumo wrestler, the mistress he mistreated, and the child they conceived. When his mistress told him she was pregnant with his baby, the sumo wrestler in...
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TIME TO GIVE THE UNBORN THEIR DUE

This week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case concerns Mississippi’s 2018 “Gestational Age Act,” which prohibits abortion after 15-weeks of gestation (13-weeks after fertilization). The question before the...
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Boomers’ Last Gasp

If someone had told me of a plan to make a three-part TV documentary based on rare footage of the Beatles’ final recording session, I would probably have said, “Why bother?” Although the preposterously premised film Yesterday—which imagined that a cosmic glitch had wiped the...
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Memento Mori

In one of the many rules St. Benedict wrote for his 6th-century religious community, the father of Western monasticism directed his monks to “remember to keep death before your eyes daily.” A dour suggestion at first blush, Benedict was urging his followers to contemplate the...
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Follow the Science Down the Yellow Brick Road

We hear a lot about nuclear stockpiles. There are pacts and treaties and deals aimed at limiting and destroying nukes. But what about virus stockpiles? The American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), headquartered in Manassas, Virginia, is, according to its website, a “global...
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