Today, December 16, at 1:00 pm, a worldwide Rosary Crusade will be inaugurated with the first Rosary being said publicly at St. John the Baptist church in Front Royal, Virginia, in the United States.

    The local pastors, Fr. Gee and Fr. Tom, have graciously agreed to open the parish to this event, which will be the first in a series of Rosary gatherings that will form a country-wide and world-wide Crusade asking the Blessed Virgin and her Merciful Son to heal the world which we see falling into unprecedented darkness before our eyes. The event will be broadcast on Zoom (link to register) as well as live-streamed on YouTube. If you have any issues accessing the Zoom or live stream, the video will be posted to our YouTube Channel this evening.

    In the words of one of the organizers: 

    “We have a deep concern for the human family and the evident descent into a type of slavery planet-wide.

    ”Of deep concern also has been the loss of the sacraments for many, whose practice of attending weekly Mass has been broken, and who now miss the Eucharist, and Baptism, and Confirmation, and the Last Rites, for many, many months, putting at risk their souls.

    ”It is time to turn to Our Lady in prayer for unity and for truth. The people of Brazil did this in a Rosary Crusade in 1964 to stave off communism: (link).

    ”This also occurred in Poland in 1920, when General Pilsudski turned back the Soviet invasion of Poland, after Pope Benedict XV called on everyone to pray for “God’s mercy for Poland … to join all the faithful in imploring the Most High God that through the intercession of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary She may save the Polish Nation from her final defeat and may turn away this new plague from Europe.” (link)

    ”Now is the time, now is the hour. Please join us!”

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

SEARCH

Is Climate Change just a Biden & Leftist Excuse to make the Poor Poorer while Attacking the Catholic Teaching on Procreation?

December 16, 2021

 

Pope Francis: No Catholic need to breed like ‘rabbits’ – BBC

“Massive amount of thinking–like truly stupendous amount of thinking–has gone into sex without purpose—without procreation. Which is actually quite a silly action in the absence of procreation. It’s a bit silly.” – A conversation between Elon Musk and Fridman centers

Joe Biden and the left use climate change as an excuse for expanding abortion without limits and attacking the Catholic Church teaching against contraception by media fear mongering on global warming while blaming procreation. 

Elle News explains their thinking on procreation:

Birth Strikers: The Women Refusing To Have Children Because Of Climate Change

A growing number of women have vowed to abstain from procreation in response to the environmental crisis. [https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a27162032/birth-strikers-women-children-climate-change/]

Why do these poor souls think this way?

Foreign Affairs shows that it is leftist politicians and apparently their media propaganda machine that drive these poor souls to insanity:

Climate change may or may not bear responsibility for the flood on last night’s news, but without question it has created a flood of despair. Climate researchers and activists, according to a 2015 Esquire feature, “When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job,” suffer from depression and PTSD-like symptoms. In a poll on his Twitter feed, meteorologist and writer Eric Holthaus found that nearly half of 416 respondents felt “emotionally overwhelmed, at least occasionally, because of news about climate change.”

For just such feelings, a Salt Lake City support group provides “a safe space for confronting” what it calls “climate grief.”

Panicked thoughts often turn to the next generation. “Does Climate Change Make It Immoral to Have Kids?” pondered columnist Dave Bry in The Guardian in 2016. “[I] think about my son,” he wrote, “growing up in a gray, dying world—walking towards Kansas on potholed highways.” Over the summer, National Public Radio tackled the same topic in “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” an interview with Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, who offers “a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.” And Holthaus himself once responded to a worrying scientific report by announcing that he would never fly again and might also get a vasectomy.

Such attitudes have not evolved in isolation. They are the most intense manifestations of the same mindset that produces regular headlines about “saving the planet” and a level of obsession with reducing carbon footprints that is otherwise reserved for reducing waistlines. Former U.S. President Barack Obama finds climate change “terrifying” and considers it “a potential existential threat.” 

[…]

And yet, such catastrophizing is not justified by the science or economics of climate change. The well-established scientific consensus that human activity is causing the climate to change does not extend to judgments about severity. The most comprehensive and often-cited efforts to synthesize the disparate range of projections—for instance, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Obama administration’s estimate of the “Social Cost of Carbon”—consistently project real but manageable costs over the century to come. To be sure, more speculative worst-case scenarios abound. But humanity has no shortage of worst cases about which people succeed in remaining far calmer: from a [interestingly] global pandemic to financial collapse to any number of military crises.[https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-03-21/problem-climate-catastrophizing]

Is climate change also an excuse to make the poor poorer?

Economist Mark Hendrickson who is fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom explains that leftist climate change insanity hurts the poor the most:

There are times when politics resembles the theater of the absurd. This is one of those times. We just witnessed the spectacle of heads of state gathering in Glasgow trying to find ways to curtail the production and consumption of fossil fuels at the very time when the people they supposedly represent face a grim, potentially lethal winter due to shortages of those vital fuels.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the average price of gasoline in the United States has risen more than 62 percent in the last 12 months, and the price of natural gas for heating homes will rise as much as 45 percent. Bank of America is predicting $120 a barrel of oil this winter. A harsher than average winter could trigger additional rises in the cost of heating our homes—a development that would be especially harsh for the poorest among us. The last time natural gas prices were this high in the United States, “one-third of American households already had difficulty … adequately heating and cooling their homes—and one-fifth of households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay energy bills,” according to The Heartland Institute.

The situation is far direr overseas…

… In Germany, not only have energy prices to homeowners risen to record highs, but their power grid has become increasingly unstable. One power plant in Germany had to close because of a lack of coal—coal being needed to compensate for the insufficient wind energy production. Germany faces a full-blown energy crisis this winter.

“Schools, hospitals and clinics could also be much chillier—and deadlier. At 11¢ per kilowatt-hour (average U.S. business rate), a 650,000-square-foot hospital would pay about $2.2 million annually for electricity. At 25¢ per kWh (UK), the annual cost jumps to $5 million; at 35¢ per kWh (Germany), to $7 million! Those soaring costs would likely result in employee layoffs, higher medical bills, reduced patient care, colder conditions, and more deaths,” Paul Driessen wrote for The Heartland Institute.

In Britain, the host country for the U.N.’s anti-fossil fuels confab, as many as 9,700 people typically die from cold in their homes each winter. There are fears that this winter’s death toll from cold (and from food shortages stemming from fertilizer shortages stemming from natural gas shortages) could be much larger. Several elder care homes have warned that crippling energy bills could force them to close, leaving their residents homeless.

The severity of this energy crisis is largely attributable to short-sighted government policies. Tilting at the windmills of an imaginary future global warming catastrophe, governments have impeded and restricted the production of fossil fuels. I’m willing to grant the possibility that so-called “renewable” energy sources (more accurately, “intermittent” energy sources) may someday replace fossil fuels, but the policies that have been restricting fossil fuel production before intermittent sources have come online fast enough to meet the global demand for energy are inhumane.Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Biden administration (or is it the third term of the Obama administration?) is proceeding full speed ahead with an anti-fossil fuels agenda. Earlier in the year, the president canceled the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline, banned drilling for oil in the Arctic, and greatly curtailed the issuance of leases for companies to develop fossil fuel resources on public land. Now, as winter approaches with energy prices surging and the world facing a severe energy crisis, Team Biden left Glasgow with a plan in place for the world’s major banks to restrict investment in companies that produce fossil fuels. [https://www.theepochtimes.com/winter-2022-a-season-of-painful-enlightenment_4107522.html?slsuccess=1]
Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia. 

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html 

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.'”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1 – A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020: 
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1 What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”: 
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 
Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it. SHARE

Letter #176, 2021, Wednesday, December 15: The Nathanson Files, Tape #5: A Wrenching Conversion    I sat down in November for an interview with Terry Beatley, author of “What if We’ve Been Wrong?” and president of the Hosea Initiative, discussing how the abortion industry has deceived Catholics. The fifth part of this interview has been posted and is now available on Rumble (link) and YouTube (link).     All of the tapes from this interview will be posted on our Rumble channel and YouTube channel so be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications to ensure you do not miss any content.    Click the video below for the fifth part of the interview in which, Terry Beatley describes how Dr. Nathanson, who had believed he was helping women by performing abortions, came to believe he was causing much harm, and became a supporter of the “pro-life” cause.    Note to readers: A special rosary will be held at St. John the Baptist Church in Front Royal, Virginia, tomorrow, Thursday, December 16 at 1 p.m. The prayer is open to all, including non-Catholics. This prayer, organized by a new group of two dozen Catholic writers and editors, will mark the beginning of a global campaign of prayer to the Virgin Mary in the present circumstances of our world, a time in which precious human dignity and the sacred dimension of the human person seem to be threatened by many challenges. —RM    ***    Note to all readers: We are now beginning our Christmas fund-raising drive. We hope to raise $30,000 between now and December 31 to support these letters, interviews, videos, and analyses during the upcoming year. Please go to this link to make your donation.

    Above left, the late Dr. Bernard Nathanson (1926-2011) meets US President Ronald Reagan; center, Dr. Nathanson and St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta; right, Dr. Nathanson meets Pope John Paul II    Here is the transcript of the fifth tape from The Nathanson Files:    Tape #5 The Nathanson Files: A Wrenching Conversion    This is part 5, in which, Terry Beatley describes how Dr. Nathanson, who had believed he was helping women by performing abortions, came to believe he was causing much harm, and became a supporter of the “pro-life” cause.    Robert Moynihan: And what did he write about the feeling of being totally guilty and really not worth living and then the feeling of being received, in some way, and then forgiven?     Beatley: He wrote about his gratitude and he spoke about it, his gratitude. Actually, what really comes to mind, yes the gratitude, but he wrote about when he was still an unbeliever and he would observe the pro-life community out in New York holding their prayer vigils in front of the Planned Parenthood facilities, what he recognized was that these people, sitting out there on cold windy days, they were so full of love and compassion and peace and hope.    And he was drawn to the source of their joy.    He wanted to know more about it.    He didn’t understand how these people could give so much of themselves for a cause where the people who were hurt by it would never thank them, the babies who were aborted.      Moynihan: And how did he come to feel about the women?     Did he feel that he had been mistaken in trying to help women in difficult circumstances and performing thousands of abortions?     What was it that he was mistaken about? Had he not been helping them?     Beatley: When Dr. Nathanson joined with Lawrence Ladder to form NARAL…     Moynihan: NARAL?     Beatley: Yeah, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the PAC.     Moynihan: What is NARAL?     Beatley: Yeah, NARAL stands for the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Law.    And so what they formed was the first pro-abortion political action organization, because they knew that the only way to have long-term victory is to be able to lay claim in the political realm.    They had to have the law on their side, obviously.      Moynihan: They were trying to, what they thought, or claimed, they were helping women.     Dr. Nathanson later concluded that somehow he had been harming women and obviously harming the fetuses, the babies that he had aborted.     But what about the women, how did he come to feel about his attitude toward women?     Beatley: He originally thought that he was helping women because he had seen some women coming into the emergency room with botched abortions before it was legalized.    And he never gave a thought about what was happening to the baby.    And I think this is really, really important to make sense of that, because, after I’ve traveled the country sharing the story about Dr. Nathanson, a common question is, “Why didn’t he give any thought to the baby?”    Well, back then, the science of fetology was a brand new science field. We are so used to now, you know, thousands of articles about fetal development and anatomy.    But back in 1969, there were only five articles about fetal anatomy and physiology.    So, and again that was all pre-real-time ultrasound, so he was very disconnected from the baby.    And he really thought he was doing the best thing for women.    Of course, what we now know is that abortion, I am not saying for every woman, you can always go out there and find some women who are proud of their abortion and they are shouting their abortion and all this, but we do know that millions of women regret their abortion.    What you have to keep in mind back then they were selling abortion as just a blob of tissue, not a baby.    What any woman and any man today know, because of real-time ultrasound, uh no.    By the time they have an abortion at 9-10-11 weeks, that baby has hands, has a face, has a beating heart.    So, the lie of yesteryear, they can no longer get away with.    So, we do know that abortion has caused many women and men to go to alcohol, alcoholism, drug abuse, depression.    We now know the connection between breast cancer and abortion, which is a very hidden topic, but one day that is going to come into the light as well.    And so, Dr. Nathanson knew that between all these different factors, there must be a better way.    And that’s why I named the book, What If We’ve Been Wrong, which is a quote from his resignation letter.    Maybe there’s a different way, maybe there’s a better way than killing babies and lying and exploiting women, for an industry that makes millions of dollars a year.    (to be continued)

Today, Friday, and Saturday are Ember DaysToday (Wednesday 12/15) is an Ember Day, allowing for two small meatless meals which together should not equal in size the main meal (that may contain meat).  Friday and Saturday of this week have the same restrictions except on Friday the main meal cannot contain meat, whereas the main meal on Saturday can contain meat. All Catholics over 7 and under 59, who are not expectant or nursing mothers, or exempted due to health reasons, are obliged to observe these regulations.

    New Ideologies Hinder Ability to Discern Right and Wrong, Says Georgian Candidate for Nobel Prize in Literature (link)    Poet and author of Georgia’s national anthem, Dato Magratze, discusses the Christian dimension of his literary work, recently presented to Pope Francis in the Vatican.    By Solène Tadié     December 14, 2021    As a passionate advocate of human freedom, Dato Magradze, author of the national anthem of Georgia, considers faith to be the greatest emancipating force of a people because it has the unique power to put the state and other earthly powers in their proper place.    It is with that in mind that the Georgian poet composed Tavisupleba (“Freedom”), officially adopted as Georgia’s new hymn in 2004, in the aftermath of the Rose Revolution,which put an end to the painful Soviet era in this Caucasus country.     While answering the Register’s questions on the occasion of the presentation of his works recently translated in Italian — promoted by the Georgian Embassy to the Holy See in Rome — Nov. 23, Magradze highlighted how adversity and the suppression of freedom have the effect of exalting the religious feeling of the people. The vibrant faith of the people of Georgia, a land and people that have suffered severely from communist totalitarianism in the 20th century, is, in his view, a good example of that.     Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Magratze also served as Georgia’s minister of culture of between 1992 and 1995 and as a member of the Parliament of Tbilisi between 1999 and 2001. An important political and intellectual figure of the Post-Soviet era in the country, the poet is convinced that the true freedom of man always derives from a choice between heaven and earth.    You met with Pope Francis in September to present him your poetic works recently translated into Italian. What impression did it leave on you?    This meeting was amazing. We discussed some very intimate things that I will not be able to reveal to your audience, but I have a wonderful memory of it. It was very important for me. When you meet the Pope, you are impressed; he always gives you the impression that you were expecting a meeting with yourself. And he has such a high spirituality that he is a very modest person.     “The state no longer seeks the man in the citizen” is a verse of yours that you often quote and that has become a kind of motto for you. Do you mean that today’s states are dehumanizing? Why?     What I want to recall by that is that God created the human person, while the state created the citizen, sometimes forgetting its sacred dimension. To compensate for this lack, the main mission of poetry is to save the human in the citizen. It is what a poet always tries to do.     What I also intend to denounce is that civilization seeks in man a criminal. Civilization was the one that crucified Jesus. Instead, culture, of which poetry is a part, seeks in the criminal a person, a man, symbolically. And it is in this that the role of the poet is fundamental for any society.     You are the author of Georgia’s national anthem, first adopted after the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003. What was your state of mind when you wrote that text?     As a poet, I never write focusing on the events of the moment. I always try to think about the language of eternity. But we, for so many years, were deprived of freedom [the country lived under the Soviet yoke for 70 years]. When we got this freedom back, emotion led me to write these verses. However, at that moment, even though the emotion sent me into raptures, I was not thinking only about the present. I was imbued with the past, present and future. For these three times, when they cancel each other out, give birth to divine time and timeless truths.    Faith and freedom are at the heart of the hymn you wrote. What relationship do you see between these two ideas? Why do you feel they are so fragile?     Faith and freedom are intrinsically linked. This is how God addressed Adam, from the pen of great medieval poet Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine” [Oratio de Hominis Dignitate].    So God did not put us in a specific place in the cosmic hierarchy: You choose whether you are to be of earth or heaven. It’s a very broad topic, but it can all be summed up to the choice between heaven and earth. It is the basis of faith.     There is another trend happening today. Some new ideologies want to ensure that human beings no longer have that fundamental freedom of choice of being able to be good or bad. It makes it so that we no longer have the necessary experience to distinguish good from evil, beauty from ugliness. Our free will is annihilated by our societies. There is a battle, a struggle between civilization and culture, as I’ve mentioned before. Civilization crucifies poetry, symbolically, of course. But culture and poetry have this faculty of always rising up in all times and preserving the timeless truths of the human person.     How would you describe the faith of the Georgian people?     It is well known that we, from the beginning, have lived in the circle of Islamism, and we’ve always been forced to defend our faith. This is the history of my country, and this is the origin of that fire, this passion of ours in defending Christianity. That fire still burns; it is very much alive in Georgia. For us, the tradition is Christianity, and it’s about passing this fire on to the next generation, instead of worshipping the ashes.     As a Christian and a politically engaged poet, how did you experience the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, that is close to your country?     We have been mediating between the two countries and peoples for some time now. They are both our friends and historical neighbors. Our prime minister, in recent months, has had very effective mediations for peace in the Caucasus. During the conflict, I couldn’t position myself only from a Christian perspective, because when the blood of human being is shed, one cannot make such considerations.    The international press has recently reported the political crisis and popular outrage in Georgia after the arrest of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who also went on a hunger strike for weeks. What is your view on the situation?    There are very serious charges against the former president. Some of the Georgian people consider that because he used to be a president, he doesn’t have to answer to these charges; but I believe that among citizens, there shouldn’t be higher categories that can absolve themselves from the laws and second-class citizens who are held accountable for their acts. The law is the same for everyone. As a Christian, I can say that we are all equal before God.     The current government, in my opinion, is very open to freedom of expression, which was not the case at the time of the former president, who also used to control the press. It is important to point this out because there is a lot of false information circulating.    Can you tell us about your next literary project?    I always work without plans. The poet’s destiny is like this: Every moment, every minute counts; you write something — then you stop to think again. You can maybe catch some details that people around you might not catch.     Here is my perception of my special vocation: While during the Eucharist, the bread and wine become the Flesh and Blood of Christ, the very simple words, the prayers of the poet, can become poetry. That is what I will continue to give to this world.

Support The Moynihan Letters

Confusion Still Reigns Over Holiday Symbols December 15, 2021 Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the never-ending confusion over the meaning of holiday symbols: Last month a Jewish woman asked a New York Times reporter whether it was discriminatory to deny the display of a menorah in the lobby of her luxury co-op while permitting a Christmas tree. The reply she received was not helpful. This month a Jewish woman from northern California lost in federal court in her attempt to have a menorah displayed alongside a Christmas tree in a public school that her child attends. Comments made by those on both sides showed how confused they are about this issue. In the New York City case, the Jewish woman was right to complain that  for many years the co-op board allowed both the Christmas tree and the menorah. What broke? However, the board chairman was right to say that the menorah is a religious symbol and a Christmas tree is a secular symbol. Nonetheless, he was wrong to imply that this meant he could not continue the practice of displaying both holiday symbols. There is no law prohibiting him from doing so, which is precisely why he never ran afoul of the law for all the years he allowed both to be displayed. A reporter for the New York Times was right to say that most apartment buildings elect to display secular symbols during the holidays, thus avoiding controversy over religious symbols. He was wrong, however, to say that the Supreme Court ruled that “a menorah is not a religious symbol when it appears alongside a Christmas tree.” The ruling in question is the 1989 County of Allegheny County v. ACLU decision, and it said no such thing. That ruling clearly said the menorah was a religious symbol, albeit one that also carried secular meaning. It was decided that it was permissible to display it in the county courthouse because it was erected alongside a Christmas tree, which it properly recognized as a secular symbol. In other words, the menorah never lost its religious significance by putting it next to a secular symbol, but the effect of doing so meant that the entire display could not reasonably be seen as an expression of religion. In the California case, the woman and her lawyers maintained that the school was showing preferential treatment to Christianity by allowing the display of a Christmas tree but not the menorah. But the former is a secular symbol; a menorah represents a miracle, and as such is properly seen as a religious symbol. The fact that the Christmas tree is associated with a religious holiday—which also happens to be a federal holiday—does not therefore make it a religious symbol anymore than Jack Frost becomes a religious symbol because it, too, is related to Christmas. It could be argued that the school could have allowed the menorah because it would have been displayed next to a Christmas tree. What complicated this case was the woman’s request to display a huge inflatable menorah; school officials contended that large inflatables are never allowed. She should have taken up their offer to display the menorah in some other part of the school. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been saying for years that the high court has failed to offer clarity on these matters. He’s right. At the root of the problem is a militant secularism and intolerance for religious liberty. Christians should welcome the erection of Jewish religious symbols in public places, and Jews should reciprocate; reasonable time limits should be observed. The fact that this even needs to be said shows how utterly bankrupt the celebration of diversity is: Those who truly believe in diversity would welcome the display of religious symbols, and not try to censor them.

Advertisement

Trending

Merck’s COVID Drug May Cause Mutated DNA, Birth Defects, Cancer, And Reduced Male Fertility, NYT Reports 

Merck’s COVID Drug May Cause Mutated DNA, Birth Defects, Cancer, And Reduced Male Fertility, NYT Reports 

Michael Chen / Flickr

Merck’s COVID Drug May Cause Mutated DNA, Birth Defects, Cancer, And Reduced Male Fertility, NYT Reports

 By Tom Pappert  December 14, 2021 at 12:35pm 

Merck’s newly FDA-approved COVID-19 antiviral drug, molnupiravir, may pose severe health consequences despite being purchased in bulk by the Biden administration prior to its approval.

According to the New York Times, the purported wonder drug may have “the potential to cause mutations in human DNA.”

Of particular concern are pregnant women, because researchers say that “the drug could affect a fetus’s dividing cells, theoretically causing birth defects.” One researcher said “there is no circumstance” in which he would advise a pregnant woman to take the drug, as a result.Advertisement – story continues belowForget The 30yr Mortgage If You Owe Less Than $356K. (Do This)LowerMyBillsDo This to Legally Erase Your Credit Card Balances (It’s Genius)FinallyZero

Buried in the middle of the New York Times article, the author explains that researchers are concerned the drug could “cause errors” in a patient’s DNA, or the DNA of an unborn child.

According to a team of researchers in North Carolina, those “errors” could cause DNA mutations that may “contribute to the development of cancer, or cause birth defects either in a developing fetus or through incorporation into sperm precursor cells.

Merck previously came under fire after selling the new drug at a 4,000% markup: The drug’s list price is $712, despite it costing the company only $17.74 to create.

Mainstream media outlets have noted that the drug represents “staggering profits” to both Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, the small company which created molnupiravir and subsequently sold it to Merck “for an undisclosed sum.” The company has been accused of “flipping” the drug for a profit.

Still, this has not stopped governments from making bulk orders of the drug even before it was approved, and even as the FDA continues to examine the repercussions of the drug’s side effects.

In October, the Biden White House purchased 1.7 million treatments worth of the new drug, costing taxpayers around $2.4 billion.

The United Kingdom followed suit, with Boris Johnson’s government buying $340 million worth of Merck’s pills for the British public.

    “The true freedom of man always derives from a choice between heaven and earth.” —Dato Magratze, Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature from the country of Georgia in the Caucasus. He recently met with Pope Francis.    Letter #175, 2021, Tuesday, Dec 14: The Sacred Person     On November 23 — three weeks ago — the Italian translation of the works of the brilliant Georgian poet Dato Magradze, author of his country’s post-Soviet national anthem, were presented to the Holy See by the Georgian embassy.     What makes this writer’s vision – centered on the freedom of the human being – so important is that it finds its ultimate meaning in “the choice between heaven and earth.”     “Faith and freedom are intrinsically linked,” he says.    The recognition of God is the only force that is able to restrain earthly powers like the state, he adds.    One of Magradze’s famous verses is: “The state no longer seeks the man in the citizen.”    He explains: “What I want to recall by that is that God created the human person, while the state created the citizen, sometimes forgetting its sacred dimension. To compensate for this lack, the main mission of poetry is to save the human in the citizen.”    In this time of lockdowns, vaccination mandates, forced acceptance of transsexualism and the reach toward transhumanism, all foisted upon us in the midst of governmental dishonesty around the globe, Magradze’s words take on a prophetic significance.    

    Note to readers: A special rosary will be held at St. John the Baptist Church in Front Royal, Virginia, in less than two days — at 1 p.m. on Thursday, December 16. The prayer is open to all, including non-Catholics. This prayer, organized by a new group of two dozen Catholic writers and editors, will mark the beginning of a campaign of prayer to the Virgin Mary in the present circumstances of our world, a time in which precious human dignity and the sacred dimension of the human person (of which this Georgian author speaks so eloquently) seem to be threatened many challenges. —RM    Note to all readers: We are now continuing our Christmas fund-raising drive. We hope to raise $30,000 between now and December 31 to support these letters, interviews, videos, and analyses during 2022. Please go to this link to make your donation.

    Here is an article from the National Catholic Register (link) on Dato Magratze, the Georgian poet laureate.    New Ideologies Hinder Ability to Discern Right and Wrong, Says Georgian Candidate for Nobel Prize in Literature (link)    Poet and author of Georgia’s national anthem, Dato Magratze, discusses the Christian dimension of his literary work, recently presented to Pope Francis in the Vatican.    By Solène Tadié     December 14, 2021    As a passionate advocate of human freedom, Dato Magradze, author of the national anthem of Georgia, considers faith to be the greatest emancipating force of a people because it has the unique power to put the state and other earthly powers in their proper place.    It is with that in mind that the Georgian poet composed Tavisupleba (“Freedom”), officially adopted as Georgia’s new hymn in 2004, in the aftermath of the Rose Revolution,which put an end to the painful Soviet era in this Caucasus country.     While answering the Register’s questions on the occasion of the presentation of his works recently translated in Italian — promoted by the Georgian Embassy to the Holy See in Rome — Nov. 23, Magradze highlighted how adversity and the suppression of freedom have the effect of exalting the religious feeling of the people. The vibrant faith of the people of Georgia, a land and people that have suffered severely from communist totalitarianism in the 20th century, is, in his view, a good example of that.     Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Magratze also served as Georgia’s minister of culture of between 1992 and 1995 and as a member of the Parliament of Tbilisi between 1999 and 2001. An important political and intellectual figure of the Post-Soviet era in the country, the poet is convinced that the true freedom of man always derives from a choice between heaven and earth.    You met with Pope Francis in September to present him your poetic works recently translated into Italian. What impression did it leave on you?    This meeting was amazing. We discussed some very intimate things that I will not be able to reveal to your audience, but I have a wonderful memory of it. It was very important for me. When you meet the Pope, you are impressed; he always gives you the impression that you were expecting a meeting with yourself. And he has such a high spirituality that he is a very modest person.     “The state no longer seeks the man in the citizen” is a verse of yours that you often quote and that has become a kind of motto for you. Do you mean that today’s states are dehumanizing? Why?     What I want to recall by that is that God created the human person, while the state created the citizen, sometimes forgetting its sacred dimension. To compensate for this lack, the main mission of poetry is to save the human in the citizen. It is what a poet always tries to do.     What I also intend to denounce is that civilization seeks in man a criminal. Civilization was the one that crucified Jesus. Instead, culture, of which poetry is a part, seeks in the criminal a person, a man, symbolically. And it is in this that the role of the poet is fundamental for any society.     You are the author of Georgia’s national anthem, first adopted after the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003. What was your state of mind when you wrote that text?     As a poet, I never write focusing on the events of the moment. I always try to think about the language of eternity. But we, for so many years, were deprived of freedom [the country lived under the Soviet yoke for 70 years]. When we got this freedom back, emotion led me to write these verses. However, at that moment, even though the emotion sent me into raptures, I was not thinking only about the present. I was imbued with the past, present and future. For these three times, when they cancel each other out, give birth to divine time and timeless truths.    Faith and freedom are at the heart of the hymn you wrote. What relationship do you see between these two ideas? Why do you feel they are so fragile?     Faith and freedom are intrinsically linked. This is how God addressed Adam, from the pen of great medieval poet Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine” [Oratio de Hominis Dignitate].    So God did not put us in a specific place in the cosmic hierarchy: You choose whether you are to be of earth or heaven. It’s a very broad topic, but it can all be summed up to the choice between heaven and earth. It is the basis of faith.     There is another trend happening today. Some new ideologies want to ensure that human beings no longer have that fundamental freedom of choice of being able to be good or bad. It makes it so that we no longer have the necessary experience to distinguish good from evil, beauty from ugliness. Our free will is annihilated by our societies. There is a battle, a struggle between civilization and culture, as I’ve mentioned before. Civilization crucifies poetry, symbolically, of course. But culture and poetry have this faculty of always rising up in all times and preserving the timeless truths of the human person.     How would you describe the faith of the Georgian people?     It is well known that we, from the beginning, have lived in the circle of Islamism, and we’ve always been forced to defend our faith. This is the history of my country, and this is the origin of that fire, this passion of ours in defending Christianity. That fire still burns; it is very much alive in Georgia. For us, the tradition is Christianity, and it’s about passing this fire on to the next generation, instead of worshipping the ashes.     As a Christian and a politically engaged poet, how did you experience the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, that is close to your country?     We have been mediating between the two countries and peoples for some time now. They are both our friends and historical neighbors. Our prime minister, in recent months, has had very effective mediations for peace in the Caucasus. During the conflict, I couldn’t position myself only from a Christian perspective, because when the blood of human being is shed, one cannot make such considerations.    The international press has recently reported the political crisis and popular outrage in Georgia after the arrest of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who also went on a hunger strike for weeks. What is your view on the situation?    There are very serious charges against the former president. Some of the Georgian people consider that because he used to be a president, he doesn’t have to answer to these charges; but I believe that among citizens, there shouldn’t be higher categories that can absolve themselves from the laws and second-class citizens who are held accountable for their acts. The law is the same for everyone. As a Christian, I can say that we are all equal before God.     The current government, in my opinion, is very open to freedom of expression, which was not the case at the time of the former president, who also used to control the press. It is important to point this out because there is a lot of false information circulating.    Can you tell us about your next literary project?    I always work without plans. The poet’s destiny is like this: Every moment, every minute counts; you write something — then you stop to think again. You can maybe catch some details that people around you might not catch.     Here is my perception of my special vocation: While during the Eucharist, the bread and wine become the Flesh and Blood of Christ, the very simple words, the prayers of the poet, can become poetry. That is what I will continue to give to this world.

NEA Dumps Militant Board Member December 14, 2021 Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a happy ending to a serious issue involving the National Education Association: Last week, we emailed a letter I wrote to the president of the National Education Association, Rebecca S. Pringle, asking her to “terminate [Mollie Paige] Mumau’s membership on the board of directors of the NEA.” I did so after learning that Mumau had posted on Facebook a call to shoot Americans who refused, on religious grounds, to receive a vaccination. Mumau posted her vile comment on December 7. My letter to the NEA chief was emailed on December 8. On the day of Mumau’s post, she was listed on the website of the NEA as a board member. We checked today and she no longer is. We pursued this issue after learning from an online news outlet, andmagazine.com, that Mumau was no longer employed by McLane High School in Erie, Pennsylvania. We called the school today to verify this account and found that it was accurate. If she is no longer employed by the school district, then it stands to reason that she cannot serve on the NEA’s board of directors; she has no standing in education. This is a great victory. “There is no legitimate place in public life for anyone who advocates the mass slaughter of innocent Americans,” I said to Pringle, “and it is doubly offensive that it should emanate from a teacher.”  We did more than write to the president of the NEA. We contacted the NEA Executive Committee, the Executive Officers of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the Superintendent of the McLane School District, and the Erie County District Attorney. We also asked our email subscribers to contact the NEA, providing them with an email address. They made it happen. We are very proud of them. Cheers everyone! At least some measure of justice has been done.

Pro-Abortion Fans Continue To Lie December 14, 2021 Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the latest wave of lies told by the fans of abortion: Given the prominence of abortion cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, the subject is weighing heavily on the minds of those on both sides of this issue. If there is one thing that everyone should insist on it is honesty. Regrettably, the pro-abortion side is jam packed with those who have a hard time telling the truth. Here are three examples, all from December, and the month is only half over. Yesterday, Whoopi Goldberg said on “The View” that “I, too, am pro-life. No one I know [who] has had an abortion went willingly or happily. They went because they had to go, because they didn’t have a choice.” They didn’t have a choice? What does this say about the “pro-choice” movement? Is it based on a lie? Moreover, it is disingenuous for Whoopi to say she is “pro-life”: it is reported that she had six or seven abortions by the age of 25. Barbara R. Casper is a retired professor of medicine at the University of Louisville, and the author of a recent op-ed in the Courier Journal on this subject. Taking the pro-abortion side, she said, “I am not pro-abortion. In fact, I dare say no one is actually pro-abortion.” She is wrong. On September 30, 2021, Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi testifiedbefore the House Oversight Committee on abortion. She told the panel that “for thousands of people I’ve cared for, abortion is a blessing, abortion is an act of love, abortion is freedom.” On December 2, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended Roe v. Wade, which effectively sanctions abortion-on-demand. She expressed grave concern over the prospect that the Supreme Court might overturn this decision. “It’s really scary—and I say that as a practicing Catholic.” The Catholic Church regards abortion to be “intrinsically evil.” By contrast, Pelosi is not only an enthusiast of partial-birth abortion, she wants to force the taxpayers to pay for them. Practicing Catholics don’t endorse the killing of babies who are 80 percent born, and they do not want the public to fund these abominable procedures. One of the great things about being pro-life is that our side doesn’t have to lie. Phone: 212-371-3191E-mail: pr@catholicleague.org