A few months ago, during the height of the latest abuse scandal, the Holy See created a new page on its website offering resources documenting the Church’s response to the problem over the last number of years.

HERE’S THE PAGE.

One of the things they put on it was a brief, layman’s guide to the procedures the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith uses in evaluating cases of priestly sexual abusers.

HERE’S THAT DOCUMENT.

One of the things that document did was say that there is a revision underway of the current regulations, which are set forth in a motu proprio called Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. Specifically, the document said:

For some time the CDF has undertaken a revision...READ MORE

It’s true!!!

Because they were programmed to!

Okay, I know that I normally blog about heavier subjects, but please indulge me in a moment of whimsy.

Recently on my personal blog I did an entry featuring a bit of computer animation I had discovered that offers a fascinating presentation of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (it’s really cool).

But this was not the only animation in the series. There are a lot of them, and one that caught my eye was titled “Bach, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, from Cantata 147 (sung by alien robots).”

Alien robots singing a favorite like Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”? That’s worth checking out.

BTW, here is what the alien robots are singing in...READ MORE

The odds that it is being infringed went down this week when, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (.pdf) in which it held that the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms applies not only to the federal government but to state and local governments as well.

Because this isn’t a legal blog, I’m going to pass over the legal intricacies and arguments that the case involved (though they are fascinating) and go to the moral issue in question: Is it a good idea for people to have the right to own guns?

Of course, we are not talking about all people without exception. As the decision in this Supreme Court case as well as the previous one noted, lawmakers...READ MORE

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let’s look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I’d like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term...READ MORE

It’s true.

In fact, he said that when “two fathers” are raising a child together, we owe them “our unending appreciation and admiration” and that this Fathers’ Day we should honor “all our fathers,” including those in homosexual, two-daddy “families.”

Admittedly, he didn’t use the term “homosexual,” but given all the other kinds of fathers he mentions, process of elimination makes it clear what he has in mind. (E.g., step fathers are given separate coverage.)

In an official presidential proclamation on the White House web site, he proclaimed:

Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a...READ MORE

Recently we were discussing the recent Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is...READ MORE

In my previous post, I took on a silly video that has more than a million views of different versions of it. The video centered on Jesus’ statement in Luke 10:18 that, after the disciples had come back from a preaching mission, Our Lord had seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven” and claimed that if you back translated this statement from Greek to Aramaic and then to Hebrew that “lighting from heaven” would come out as “baraq o baw-maw” or “Barack Obama.” This, the nameless creator of the video suggested, might mean that Jesus was telling us the Antichrist’s name would be Barack Obama.

I greeted the logic of this video with a great big gift bag full of “Nope.”

Whatever Barack...READ MORE

Just, y’know, not good evidence.

Consider the following video, which has been going around the Internet, with over a million hits on YouTube between different versions.

Okay. So that kind of settles it.

NOT.

I don’t know who is behind the video, but whoever it is clearly has only the most rudimentary understanding of the things he’s talking about, and he makes mistakes left and right. (Put another way: He’s totally out of his depth.) This is made clear by the annotations that start popping up in the video (you can shut them off with the controller in the lower right hand corner) that, among other things, advertise an updated version of the video, in which he tries to eliminate some...READ MORE