Al Kresta's Blog, page 24

Music Video Showing Daughter Surviving Abortion Gets 100,000 Views in 5 Days

by Steven Ertelt, Brian Mayes | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 9/24/13 5:16 PM
The former lead singer of Kansas, whose amazing video for his new single tells the story of his adopted daughter’s birth and surviving an abortion, has gone viral.

Elefante released a music video for the song, “This Time,” which was inspired by his adopted daughter Sami’s birth. Posted to YouTube and announced on September 16th, the video quickly went viral, with more than 100,000 views in just the first five days.

The song’s lyrics are based
on the true story of what Sami’s 13-year old birth mother might have experienced as “she sat cold in a waiting room, frightened and all alone / knowing that her baby would soon be gone.” As the video unfolds, we see the dreams she had of a little girl celebrating her third birthday and growing into a woman through the years, and we hear the voice she heard telling her to “run away / you’re not taking her / this time.”

Read the rest at http://www.lifenews.com/2013/09/24/singers-music-video-shows-his-adopted-daughter-surviving-abortion-gets-10000-views-in-5-days/

40 Days for Life Pro-Life Prayer Event Begins Today, Changes Lives Forever

by Shawn Carney | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 9/25/13 10:40 AM

40 Days for Life has officially begun in 306 cities across America and around the globe!
I just spoke at a 40 Days for Life kickoff event in California, David Bereit, our national director, helped get things started in Birmingham, Alabama, Steve Karlen, our North American outreach director spoke at the Dallas, Texas kickoff event, and Robert Colquhoun, our international outreach director, is launching campaigns in London.

To celebrate the launch of this campaign, here’s a BRAND-NEW short video that shows what God is accomplishing through 40 Days for Life — and how YOU can make a lifesaving impact over these 40 days.
In this short video, you’ll meet people whose lives are forever changed … because of faithful, prayerful volunteers … during 40 Days for Life.

In the video, you’ll meet people whose lives have been forever changed … thanks to faithful 40 Days for Life volunteers.

You’ll hear from former Planned Parenthood managers — and a woman who chose life for her baby, simply because people were outside the abortion center praying for her … and her child.
Please share this video with everyone you know … so they can discover what 40 Days for Life is all about — and so they can join you in this worldwide movement to end the injustice of abortion!




Find out more at http://www.lifenews.com/2013/09/25/40-days-for-life-pro-life-prayer-event-begins-today-changes-lives-forever/

Vatican Official: Pelosi Shouldn’t Receive Communion

By Andrew JohnsonSeptember 25, 2013 3:35 PMNational Review Online Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke said that Nancy Pelosi should be denied communion because her support of abortion is in conflict of her Catholic faith. He took particular issue with the minority leader’s refusal to comment on abortionist and murderer Kermit Gosnell because she said “as a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground” for her.

“To say that these are simply questions of Catholic faith which have no part in politics is just false and wrong,” Cardinal Burke said in an interview with The Wanderer, a Catholic newspaper. “This is a person who obstinately, after repeated admonitions, persists in a grave sin — cooperating with the crime of procured abortion.”

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke“For Catholic institutions or individuals to give recognition to such persons, to honor them in any way, is a source of grave scandal for which they are responsible,” he continued. “In a certain way, they contribute to the sinfulness of the individuals involved.”

The cardinal said he feared for Pelosi “if she does not come to understand how gravely in error she is” and called on her to look to St. Thomas More as inspiration; More was a 16th-century member of Parliament who was executed for defending his Catholic faith.

Read the rest here: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/359511/vatican-official-pelosi-shouldnt-receive-communion-andrew-johnson

Little Sisters of the Poor sue over Obamacare fines, contraception requirement

By JOEL GEHRKE | SEPTEMBER 24, 2013 AT 6:47 PM Washington Examiner

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finalized a contraception mandate that ignores the fact groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor are religious organizations, according to a lawsuit filed to protect them against fines for refusing to comply with an Obamacare mandate.
"We cannot violate our vows by participating in the government's program to provide access to abortion-inducing drugs,” Sister Loraine Marie said of a class-action lawsuit filed against the mandate on behalf of multiple religious organizations that provide health benefits.



The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents the plaintiffs, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

The choice of jurisdiction is critical: The Colorado district court falls under the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, and thus is governed by that court's precedent in most cases.

A 10th Circuit panel ruled earlier this year that the owners of Hobby Lobby did not have to comply with the HHS mandate (that lawsuit was also filed by the Becket Fund). President Obama's attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 10th Circuit's ruling.

“The Sisters should obviously be exempted as ‘religious employers,’ but the government has refused to expand its definition,” Becket Fund senior counsel Mark Rienzi said.

“These women just want to take care of the elderly poor without being forced to violate the faith that animates their work. The money they collect should be used to care for the poor like it always has -- and not to pay the IRS,” he said.

Source: http://washingtonexaminer.com/little-sisters-of-the-poor-sue-over-obamacare-fines-contraception-requirement/article/2536338

Church dumps rebel priest

Victoria
September 21, 2013(21)

 
Barney ZwartzReligion editor, The Age
Father Greg Reynolds: Defrocked and excommunicated over his support for women priests and gays.
Photo: Angela Wylie Dissident priest Greg Reynolds has been both defrocked and excommunicated over his support for women priests and gays - the first person ever excommunicated in Melbourne, he believes.
The order comes direct from the Vatican, not at the request of Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart, and apparently follows a secret denunciation in the best traditions of the inquisition, according to Father Reynolds.

The excommunication document - written in Latin and giving no reason - was dated May 31, meaning it comes under the authority of Pope Francis who made headlines on Thursday calling for a less rule-obsessed church.

Father Reynolds, who resigned as a parish priest in 2011 and last year founded Inclusive Catholics, said he had expected to be laicised (defrocked), but not excommunicated. But it would make no difference to his ministry.

  ''In times past excommunication was a huge thing, but today the hierarchy have lost such trust and respect,'' he said. ''I've come to this position because I've followed my conscience on women's ordination and gay marriage.''

According to church teaching, excommunication is the strongest sanction and means one can not hold any office or receive any sacraments. Being laicised means one is no longer a priest.
Fairfax Media understands that the only other Melbourne priests laicised against their will have been notorious paedophiles.

Archbishop Hart was widely criticised after his appearance at the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled child sexual abuse when he replied to a question about why it took the church 18 years to ask the Vatican to defrock paedophile Desmond Gannon: ''Better late than never.''

As with the removal of Bishop Bill Morris from Toowoomba, the Vatican moved much more swiftly on Father Reynolds over women priests.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/church-dumps-rebel-priest-20130920-2u5jp.html#ixzz2fxkBYggm

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After couple cancels wedding plans, bride’s family turns reception into a dinner for the homeless

September 24, 2013 By Deacon Greg Kandra
The Deacon's Bench
 
Willie H. Fowler (center), his daughter Tamara and wife Carol (right) socialize with Elisabeth Omilami. Photo: Jonathan Phillips/Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I love this story:

Hosts of a cancelled wedding donated an elaborate reception to Atlanta’s homeless last Sunday.

Carol and Willie Fowler teamed up with Hosea Feed the Hungry, a local organization serving families in need, to turn the wedding-that-wasn’t into the first annual Fowler Family Celebration of Love, feeding 200 unexpected guests.

“We’re very pleased that she’s handling it so well,” Carol Fowler told Here & Now about her daughter. “She was also very delighted to see and know that others had an opportunity to enjoy something, rather than just allow it to go to waste.”

Elizabeth Omilami, head of Hosea Feed the Hungry, told Here & Now that the children who attended the event will never forget it.

“The passed hors d’oeuvre were very interesting because the children were wondering, ‘could we take the whole tray, or do we just take one off of the tray?’” Omilami said. “So this was an educational opportunity as well, because now they all know how to eat at a four-course meal and the etiquette involved in that.”

Read the rest here:  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/deaconsbench/2013/09/after-couple-cancels-wedding-plans-brides-family-turns-reception-into-a-dinner-for-the-homeless/

 

The Jesuit, Pope Francis, and the Poor

September 24, 2013
by Samuel Gregg
Crisis Magazine
 
 Since the first Jesuit pope’s election earlier this year, the words “poverty” and “the poor” have acquired fresh resonance inside and outside the Catholic Church. Of course the Catholic Church has always devoted special attention to the materially poor and otherwise suffering. And with Pope Francis, one senses he is the real deal regarding poverty. There is not a trace of champagne socialist or middle-class lefty about the man.
 But Francis isn’t the first to have used the phrase “a poor church of the poor.” It’s also been employed in a positive fashion by figures ranging from the father of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez, to critics of Marxist-versions of the same theology. In a 2011 meeting with German Catholic lay associations, for instance, Benedict XVI challenged the very wealthy—and notoriously bureaucratized—German Church to embrace poverty. By this, Benedict meant the Church detaching itself from “worldliness” in order to achieve “liberation from material and political burdens and privileges,” thereby breaking free of the institutional-maintenance mindset that plagues contemporary German Catholicism and opening itself “in a truly Christian way to the whole world.”

Going back in time, it was another pope, Blessed John XXIII, who brought the term “the church of the poor” to prominence. But as far as unpacking its meaning is concerned, perhaps the first to do so was one of the twentieth-century’s best Catholic theologians, the Jesuit Jean Daniélou (1905-1974). Understanding how important the expression would be after Vatican II, Daniélou devoted a chapter in his 1965 book, L’Oraison, problème politique (Prayer as a Political Problem), to clarifying the meaning of “l’église des pauvres.”

Daniélou brought unique perspectives and experiences to this question. The son of a politician from an anti-clerical family (who wasn’t baptized until his twenties) and an aristocratic mother (a formidable Catholic intellectual in her own right), Daniélou was famed for his independence of thought. When many French Catholics opted for Marshal Pétain and Vichy in 1940, for example, Daniélou chose Charles de Gaulle and Free France. Viewed with suspicion before Vatican II, Daniélou served as a peritus at the 21st ecumenical council because of his contribution to reviving patristic studies.

Read the rest at: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/the-jesuit-pope-francis-and-the-poor?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29

Is There Room, for Sarah?

First Things
September 24, 2013 Elizabeth Scalia

In his remarks to the press this past Sunday, following the release of Antonio Spadaro’s broad-ranging and inspiring interview with Pope Francis, New York’s Timothy Cardinal Dolan called the pope’s pronouncements “a breath of fresh air” and added, “He’s a great relief to all of us.”

I have felt it, too: relief. Pope Francis has redefined no dogma, changed no doctrine; he has done little more, actually, than change the tone of the voice of Rome, and yet that tonal adjustment has allowed an exhalation that feels like a sigh of completion. Amid a Church that has held its breath for decades while traipsing the wire between a pre- and post-concillar understanding of itself, this feels like we have finally reached the other side. As I read the profoundly pastoral Spadaro interview, though, I kept wishing my friend Sarah could read it, too.

I never met Sarah; ours was one of those modern online friendships defined by two people who never reside in the same time zone, yet—thanks to the combox and email—become intimate, devoted friends. She was a Lutheran, a scholar, a veteran who served twenty years in the military and then took up accounting, and she wrote the most fascinating, informative missives. When I mentioned that I was considering purchasing a handgun, Sarah gave me serious advice about what weapon might best suit me and also sent along images of handbags suitable for gun-carrying. When I was slow to make my purchase she hectored me about it, because, in her considered opinion, self-sufficient, firearms-proficient women could civilize the whole world in a week.

I loved her. She was kind and funny, and generous; the sort of person who is aware of her own shortcomings and therefore quick to give everyone else the benefit of a doubt. Although a Lutheran, she loved the Rosary and prayed the beads every night along with a podcast recording I had made of each mystery. She read, and loved, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Edith Stein, and also Pope Benedict XVI, with whom she identified, calling him “undervalued.” Still, she declared she could never convert because “the church wouldn’t have me, as I am.”

By which she meant, as a post-operative, transgendered woman.

Read the rest at: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/09/is-there-room-for-sarah

Fair, truthful look at opposing arguments

Pittsburgh Catholic
 Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh
MIKE AQUILINA Book Review"Dangers to the Faith: Recognizing Catholicism's 21st-Century Opponents," by Al Kresta. Our Sunday Visitor, 2013 (www.osv.com; 800-348-2440). 304 pages. $14.95.

When I was very young, I toured a newsroom, and I remember seeing a card at someone's desk. It read: "Is it true? Is it kind?"

Those questions have always summed up the profession of journalism for me. Honesty and charity are defining qualities of the best in the business.

They define Al Kresta, and they shine throughout his new book, "Dangers to the Faith: Recognizing Catholicism's 21st-Century Opponents" (Our Sunday Visitor).

Kresta is a veteran broadcast journalist and host of the daily "Kresta in the Afternoon" talk show, which airs on more than 220 stations as well as on Sirius satellite radio.

His fans (I confess, I am one) wait upon his wit and pithy, memorable phrases. They will not be disappointed by "Dangers to the Faith," and I suspect their numbers will swell.

It is an eminently useful book, addressing challenges to the Catholic faith most commonly encountered in the media, in the classroom and in the workplace. Kresta presents the charges, almost always in the words of those making the charge, and then he provides the Catholic response. Many of the charges are based on misunderstandings, urban legends or bigotry, and Kresta is expert at exposing these for what they are.

What makes him especially effective, though, is that he manages to do this in a way that's always fair, always kind and scrupulously truthful.

The key, I think, is that he looks to the source of the charges and sees "opponents," not "enemies."
"This is a work about opponents to the Catholic faith," he writes. "We owe it to them, as a mark of decency and common humanity, to represent their positions in ways that they would recognize as fair and accurate." Then he follows through. He assumes good will. He goes not for the jugular, but for conversion. Some of the opponents come off looking quite virtuous, if badly mistaken.

"Dangers" is structured as a handbook, easily browsed to find quick answers to the zinger someone threw at you today. Why did the Catholic Church brutally suppress all but the four canonical Gospels? Why is the Catholic Church opposed to genetic research? What does the pope have against science?....

Read the rest at: http://diopitt.org/pittsburgh-catholic/fair-truthful-look-opposing-arguments