Category Archives: Freedom of Religion

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Amanda Marcotte and #VanceDerangementSyndrome It's a natural follow-on from her #TrumpDerangementSyndrome

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s previous Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar, and the beer light behind her advertises Bud Light.

If someone were to ask me what the very lovely Amanda Marcotte hates the most, Republicans, Donald Trump, Christianity, Donald Trump, pro-life people, Donald Trump, conservatives, Donald Trump, pregnancies, J D Vance, or Donald Trump, while it wouldn’t be hard to say that she hates President Trump with a white-hot, #TrumpDerangementSyndrome-inflamed passion, she seems almost equally outraged by everything else.

I had just posted my previous article on Vice President J D Vance’s new book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, when the thought occurred to me, “I wonder what that hater of all things Christian thinks of his book.” Miss Marcotte had already published an article entitled Divorce him already, Usha, claiming that “JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other,” while also laughably claiming that Salon, her publisher, is “a journalistic outfit,” a rather callous call to make the then three Vance children fatherless, only to wax wroth when Mrs Vance, along with Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, announced their pregnancies at about the same time.

So, naturally, I checked Salon, and was unsurprised by what I found: Continue reading →

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“Communion,” by J D Vance

I have my rosary hanging from the rear view mirror of my 2010 Ford F-150.

I will admit that it’s truly baffling to me that the northeast, the most politically liberal area of our country, is also our most heavily Catholic region, yet our good friends on the left love to spend their time bashing Catholics. It kind of makes me wonder just how actually Catholic they are.

Our 46th President was famously Catholic, attending Mass frequently, but he nevertheless supported but he prenatal infanticide, including wanting the federal government to pay for abortions including helping to pay for women in states which ban abortions to travel to states which do not, homosexuality, transgenderism, including overturning bans on transgender surgeries for minors, all things which the Church says are sins. Under his Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” due to the alleged:

probability that policy issues of mutual interest to RMVEs (Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists) and RTE (Radical-Traditionalist Catholics) adherents will remain in the public spotlight. Catalyzing events in which RMVEs and RTC adherents might have common cause include legislation or judicial decisions in areas such as abortion rights, immigration, affirmative action, and LBGTQ protections.

After this was exposed, FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth as to the extent of the program.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, undoubtedly to their discomfort, that “Catholicism is growing in Philly and New Jersey. Who’s filling the pews? Local diocese officials are confirming what’s becoming a global trend: more people are converting or coming back to Catholicism.”

That would undoubtedly appall the very lovely Jennifer Palmeiri, once Hillary Clinton’s director of communications, caught in this exchange when Mrs Clinton’s campaign e-mails were hacked and disclosed by Wikileaks:

Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

That was then, and this is now, where we come to Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, by Vice President J D Vance.

Vance’s new book puts his Catholic faith at the center of his story — and his political future

by Steve Contorno | Monday, June 15, 2026

When JD Vance published his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2016, he had drifted away from the Christian faith of his childhood — a familiar story amid a broader national retreat from organized religion that had left church pews emptier than in previous decades.

Now, Vance as vice president — and likely 2028 presidential contender — is a practicing Catholic, a conversion he has chronicled in his second book, “Communion,” publishing Tuesday. And it’s landing on bookshelves amid a remarkable turnaround: Catholicism is, by some measures, experiencing a resurgence in the United States unlike anything in recent memory.

An American-born pope presides over the Vatican the first time in the church’s history. While Catholicism still faces long-term demographic struggles, conversions are surging, with some dioceses reporting record highs. Accounts of Gen Z converts filling church pews have injected new energy into the 2,000-year-old religion and have surprised even Catholic leaders who had long braced for continued decline.

I note, with some amusement, that the CNN article did not include a link to Mr Vance’s book. I am not particularly surprised.

St Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, where I attend Mass. Photo by D R Pico.

My small parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to be statistically significant, but we have seen that new energy as well. We have a couple and another man coming in as catechumens, and two new already Catholic families, along with another man, have moved in as well. For a small parish, in a small county, in an area of the country with few Catholics, it’s noticeable.

“Rather than doing the JFK thing and saying, ‘I’m not going to be a Catholic president,’ (Mr Biden said), ‘If I’m elected president, here is how my Catholic faith will inform my presidency,’” (Terry Schilling, the founder of American Principles Project) said.

President Biden’s Catholic faith didn’t inform his presidency very much it would seem. Rather, Mr Biden, like so many other elected Catholic Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, found that being a Democrat was far, far, far more important to them than being Catholic.

Polling shows that Catholics are moving in the direction of those who identify as evangelicals by becoming more conservative. Trump won 59% of Catholics in 2024, according to CNN exit polls, higher than any Republican presidential nominee since at least 1972. New converts and recently ordained priests and nuns also appear to be considerably more conservative than those born into the religion and older clergy, said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at the Washington University Center on Religion and Politics.

You mean, Catholics are becoming more Catholic? That’s what we need to see!

We are seeing the weirdness of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate from the Lone Star State, and a Presbyterian Church USA seminarian, telling us that he is a devout Christian, but he supports prenatal infanticide, using the story of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) as a supposedly Christian argument for it, supports “trans children”, and The Advocate, a ‘magazine’ which supports homosexuality and transgenderism, has said the candidate “has positioned himself as a fierce queer ally, even using the Bible to advocate in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.” With that kind of idiocy oozing from a supposedly Protestant Christian church, we need more men like Vice President Vance to argue and testify for the truth.

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Navy Joan Roberts is probably better off with her father being absent Perhaps the current generation of young adults are going to do things better

In the 1960s, I was the boy who was embarrassed about growing up without a father in small-town Mt Sterling, Kentucky. Divorce was far less common at the time, and all of the kids I knew in Mt Sterling Elementary School had fathers, or at least the ones about whom I knew anything about their families. I was the outlier!

My mother moved us to Mt Sterling because her sister had been able to get her a job. Our family, from Antioch, California, with a detour to Portland, Maine, my mother’s hometown, was completely unknown to the people there, and naturally no one had seen or heard of my father; there was no knowledge of him whatsoever, no knowledge that he had completely abandoned his wife and three children, so it could have been, at least for the townspeople, a question of whether it was somehow my mother’s fault. If you think that’s strange, it wouldn’t be to the mind of a nine-year-old boy with a girl’s first name, and the first one wearing glasses to boot. I at least think I can understand what life must be like for almost eight-year-old Navy Joan Roberts, growing up without her father, Hunter Biden.

Oh, there are certainly differences: my sisters and I grew up poor, because good jobs for women were rare in the sixties, and my father saw child support as more of an option than an obligation; men could get away with that far more at the time. My mother worked hard and struggled, in ways that it has taken the responsibilities of adulthood to make me understand now. Young Miss Roberts, and her mother Lunden Roberts, aren’t having to struggle too much financially, because her father has been hit with very substantial child support payments, but it’s also public knowledge that the younger Miss Roberts is a bastard, something that, as a child, I only feared people might think of me, and the fact that the older Miss Roberts was working as a stripper undoubtedly has many people thinking poorly of her. I guess that she was doing what she had to do to keep a roof over her head.

At a time when the Biden family ought to be slipping back into obscurity, former First Lady Jill Biden is back in the headlines as she has to do a tour to sell her book View from the East Wing: A Memoir. The problem for the tour is that Dr Biden has been denying that she saw in her husband what any wife should have noticed: that he was in serious mental decline, and her stories as she makes the rounds of talk shows have been shifting and never sounding truthful.

ABC’s ‘The View’ is a place for journolism, not journalism, but it is also a place in which the hostesses sometimes go off-script, and things like Dr Biden’s paean for her stepson get broadcast without critical thinking. Critical thinking is then applied from outside, as the former First Lady’s effusive praise of her wastrel stepson gets hammered from outside. President Biden finally acknowledged the young Miss Roberts as his granddaughter, though to my knowledge Dr Biden never did.

She’s certainly never been invited to family get-togethers, but the younger Mr Biden had married Melissa Cohen not long after his daughter was born, so such would be pretty awkward. Mr Biden knew that he had knocked up the elder Miss Roberts before he married someone else.

I have to confess here: I do not understand family relationships these days. My wife and I had been married, married for a few years, before our children were born, and after 47 years, we’re still married. I just don’t get men fathering children without the least regard for marrying the mothers or rearing their children. I suppose the things I saw so negatively when I was a child are commonplace now, and perhaps children growing up today without their fathers around just see it as normal, and hardly different from a bunch of the other children they know.

Our great, Christian society and culture has lost something. Now discussions are about “body counts,” how many people you’ve screwed, and, as much as it would horrify the lovely Amanda Marcotte, the fact that men trying to rack up high body counts for themselves are also ruling out women with high body counts as potential wives, even though women don’t get to rack up high body counts without men going right along with it.

But there is hope! Britain’s very leftist The Guardian reported that ‘millennials’ are not ‘hooking up’ for random sex as much as previous generations. A Google search for current generation having less sex turned up many more such articles, though several were hidden behind paywalls.

Along similar lines, we have reported on the slow growth of the Catholic Church, the faith that President Biden and his wife have professed, a faith which does not support contraception and abortion the way Miss Marcotte does, a faith which encourages personal responsibility and the confession of sins. Our good friends on the left hated people like Charlie Kirk for stressing such to college students, and the previously mentioned 48-year-old Miss Marcotte sees three married Republican women getting pregnant at about the same time through conspiracy theory eyes rather than more conservative women actually having more babies. She really, really, really doesn’t want the next generation of young adults to disapprove of her view about life and marriage and sex.

It will take more time to see how this all plays out, but perhaps, just perhaps, we are seeing a more conservative social and cultural movement among Americans.

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James Talarico: a representative of failing ‘progressive’ Christianity, and a hypocrite to boot Former 'vegan' campaigner now chows down on barbeque to appeal to Texas voters

In a move reminiscent of Democratic congressional candidate Amy McGrath Hnderson being caught on tape, fund raising in Massachusetts for a congressional seat in the Bluegrass State, saying “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Texas Democratic Senate nominee was caught on tape saying, in a 2022 state House of Representatives campaign, “I am proud to say that our campaign has officially become a non-meat campaign. We are only buying vegan products from our local vegan businesses.”

Now Mr Talarico is telling us, it ain’t true, ’cause see, I is eating spare ribs and turkey drumsticks.

Battling rumors that he is a sexual neuter or homosexual, the 36-year-old Mr Talarico announced that yes, he has a girlfriend, saying “She is my rock. She is my best friend. I don’t know if I could have gotten through the last six months of this crazy race if she hadn’t been by my side.” She’s been “by (his) side” so much that no one knows who she is or has a photo of her with him.

Oh, we’ll eventually see a name and photo of her, a version of the fake dating books now popular for some reason, but she’s just as likely to be a beard to get him past election day. Continue reading →

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They’re dead; what more could be done to them?

There’s some silliness in Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s concluding statement about the San Diego mosque killings:

(Cain) Clark and (Caleb) Vazquez’s hideous rampage almost certainly would have been treated as a murder, charges if they had lived. But in the hands of the Trump DOJ they may well not have been slapped with federal hate crime charges. This glaring laxity is just enough space for the Cains and Vazquez’s of America to run loose.

Uhhh, the killers are stone-cold graveyard dead; there’s not a lot more we could do to them at this point.

Why the San Diego Mosque’s Shooters Continue to Run Loose

Many police departments see hate crime data as a politically loaded minefield, leaving the FBI blind to the true scale of civil rights violence.

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson | Wednesday, May 20, 2026

At a news conference within hours after the shooting rampage at the San Diego Mosque, the San Diego Police Chief said the obvious: “The shooting would be investigated as a hate crime until it’s not.” His add-on, “it’s not,” gave with one hand and took back with the other on the issue of whether the rampage was a hate crime.

The FBI was only marginally less equivocal about whether the shooting was a hate crime. A top official promised to leave no stone unturned and said, “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved.” But he also gave with one hand and took back with the other. He quickly added that he did not see the murderous attack as “a specific threat to the mosque.”

The police are usually circumspect in issuing statements like this; is it any surprise that they were so this time?

The irony is that the alleged shooters, Clark Cain and Caleb Vazquez, left little doubt as to why they shot up the mosque. In what’s usual in these kinds of mass killings, the shooters leave a disjointed journal filled with scribblings that spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims. The pair did the same. If ever there was a smoking gun on a hate motive for the killing, they provided it with their diatribes against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims.

But why should that surprise? Surveys have repeatedly shown that hate crimes, violence, harassment, and threats against Muslims have been almost the norm in many circles. Dozens of neo-Nazis, anti-government, white supremacist groups, and tens of thousands of individuals spew hate with aplomb. The site’s writers lambaste blacks, Jews, gays, and are unabashed in praise of Hitler. They perennially exhort their readers and followers to arm themselves to the teeth against the imagined assault by the federal government on white people’s rights. It was virtually a given that the murders would fire the horde of racists up and ignite a frenzy of debate, speculation, denial, and even veiled acquiescence to the murders.

In reading those two paragraphs, I see no evidence or even allegations of a crime prior to the killings. Their speech was certainly offensive, but offensive speech is part of our freedom of speech. If people’s “scribblings . . . spew hate against Blacks, Jews, and Muslims,” are there not other people spewing hatred of whites and Christians and really normal people in general? Does Mr Hutchinson want the Geheime Staatspolizei to search every computer posting, or perhaps search people’s homes for written journals looking for hate speech? We have reported many times on the FBI under the Biden Administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” looking for “domestic violent extremists”, before the program was made public and embarrassment made the FBI shut it down, and even then FBI Director Christopher Wray lied through his scummy teeth about the extent of it.

However, even when the Cains and Vazquezes are known, tracked, monitored, and surveilled, and worse commit hate acts, they often evade full punishment. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, but rather muddled, confused, and outright lax enforcement and prosecution of hate acts. Even when the FBI and local law enforcement agencies ID them for their propensity for violence, their hands are still tied.

The author keeps mistakenly referring to Cain Clark as Clark Cain.

It’s still early in the investigations, but if Messrs Clark and Vasquez committed any previous crimes, I haven’t yet seen such reported, and I have searched. If either committed offenses as juveniles, those records would have been sealed. News flash: neither the local police nor the FBI can do anything about people who have not yet committed actual crimes.

Another point: while Mr Vasquez was 18, Mr Clark was a minor at 17. Had they survived and been tried for murder, Mr Clark could be sentenced to nothing more than life without the possibility of parole. Mr Vasquez could be sentenced to death, but the Pyrite State has not actually executed anyone for the last twenty years. A ‘hate crime’ rider could do nothing more to them.

ABC Channel 7 reported:

A Sonnenrad patch, depicting a neo-Nazi symbol, and what analysts assess is likely a patch for a militant accelerationist group, are both visible on the plate carrier being worn by the person believed to be Clark, according to sources. Additionally, writings are visible on a gun, including drawings of SS bolts and neo-Nazi insignias, sources said.

According to our good friends on the left, Nazi symbols and signs are not at all disqualifying, at least not when it comes to a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, but just youthful mistakes.

But it shows you the depth of the problem about which Mr Hutchinson complained. The same Democrats who are willing to forgive Graham Platner’s ‘youthful mistake’ were also willing to surveil devout Catholics who simply preferred the Latin Mass. Mr Hutchinson would, like the FBI surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics,” criminalize thoughts. Like the movie Minority Report, they want to lock up potential criminals before they’ve committed any crime.

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Our good friends on the left are ‘alarmed’ at the notion of a religious revival

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States specifies:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Our good friends on the left seem to believe that it says more than it means, but, of course, they’re idiots.

Trump-backed faith event features conservative Christians as critics decry blurring of church-state lines

By David Hood-Nuño and Julio-Cesar Chavez | Sunday, May 17, 2026 | 6:06 AM EDT

A Trump administration-backed celebration of U.S. ​religious heritage on Sunday highlighted conservative Christian leaders’ ties to the president as critics expressed the gathering did not reflect the country’s diverse faith ‌landscape.

Well, of course not: how do you reflect a “diverse faith network” in a single event?

Thousands of people attended the nine-hour program, called “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” for a mixture of popular worship music and speakers from evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholic traditions.

Sunday’s events included video messages from members of the Trump administration such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. All of them generally stuck to ​the prevailing theme of the day, touching on the Judeo-Christian roots of the country’s founders and the themes they incorporated into some landmark documents such as ​the Declaration of Independence.

The event mixed elements of a rally and a religious service, where chants of “U-S-A” broke out in the crowd ⁠at times with contemporary Christian artists like Chris Tomlin leading the crowd in well-known worship songs.

Further down:

Advocates of church-state separation said the event blurs government and religion.

“This government-sponsored prayer fest ​is the epitome of exactly what our secular Constitution forbids our government from doing,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, in a statement.

Well, of course: the “Freedom From Religion Foundation.” The First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a particular state religion, but a public event, regardless of how religious it is, does not constitute the establishment of a state church. Miss Gaylor seems to have missed that the part of the First Amendment which states that there may be no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” when it comes to religion.

Several government leaders attended the event, though President Trump did not, but no one was required to attend.

Faith leaders who spoke included ​Bishop Robert Barron, from the Catholic Diocese ⁠of Winona-Rochester; Jonathan Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University, a school established by Christian evangelicals; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City.

So, the event was neither exclusively Protestant or Catholic, or even restricted to Christians.

The very lovely Amanda Marcotte was appalled in advance:

It’s perhaps telling that Amanda Marcotte’s old Twitter biography photo was taken in a bar. It’s even more telling that the beer light is for Bud Light, of Dylan Mulvaney infamy.

The Christian right hijacks America’s 250th

Trump’s Rededicate 250 event erases the U.S.’s secular history

By Amanda Marcotte | Friday, May 15, 2026 | 6:45AM EDT

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why.

Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

Has Miss Marcotte forgotten that many of the people who came to this country came to be able to practice their faiths as they saw fit. The Pilgrims, from whom I am descended, believed that the established Church of England was corrupt beyond salvation, while the Puritans wanted to reform and purify the Church of England from within. Maryland was established as a safe haven for Catholics, who were persecuted in England. Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a “holy experiment” to create a sanctuary for religious freedom, particularly for Quakers — Mr Penn was a Quaker — facing persecution in England. These were all Christians, simply of different denominations.

At the time the First Amendment was ratified, several states still had established state churches, all of which were Protestant Christian of one denomination or another.

On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Were you alarmed? I know that I certainly wasn’t!

The founders would not doubt be appalled, as there is nothing to rededicate; they explicitly wrote the Constitution to reflect their belief that the U.S. is a secular nation. But Trump’s second term has been dominated by a single-minded determination to erase real history and replace it with self-flattering fantasies of the MAGA movement. As Jason Kyle Howard recently wrote in Salon, Trump’s efforts to inflict his grotesque architectural tastes on the nation’s capital cannot be separated from the administration’s schemes “to undermine the living history of Black and brown Americans, women and the LGBTQ+ community, and to paper over the legacy of the post-World War II liberal order.”

I think she meant “no doubt,” rather than “not doubt,” but of what there is no doubt is that the founders saw the new nation that they created as a Christian nation, not a secular one as Miss Marcotte fantasizes. A couple of the founders, Thomas Jefferson specifically, were “deists,” people who believed that there must be a creator God, but one who does not interfere in human affairs, nor left us with any holy books or instructions. Mr Jefferson had his own ‘cut and paste’ version of the New Testament, one which focused on Jesus’ morals and teachings, while omitting miracles or supernatural references, but we were an almost entirely Protestant, albeit with competing denominations, Christian nation, and it is the writer from Salon who is attempting to “undermine the living history” our nation.
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Just how early on did the Democratic staffers realize that Joe Biden was sinking into dementia?

This site has reported, several times, on the anti-Catholic bias of the Democratic Party, including the actions of the federal government investigating “radical traditionalist Catholics”, and that FBI Director Christopher Wray lied under oath about the extent of the program.

President Biden was very famously Catholic, frequently attending Mass, even though his policies on transgenderism and prenatal infanticide were very much opposed to the teachings of the Church he claimed to follow, so one would think that officials in his Administration would use a bit of caution when attacking the Catholic Church as an institution, and Catholics in general. Still, the investigations referenced above occurred in early 2023, two years into Mr Biden’s term in office.

But now we have this, from Robert Stacy McCain’s old newspaper, The Washington Times:

Biden DOJ fantasized about prosecuting habit-wearing nuns

By Susan Ferrechio | Thursday, April 30, 2026

Justice Department prosecutors under the Biden administration exchanged texts relishing the chance to prosecute Catholic nuns — particularly traditional nuns “who still wear the head habit.”

One of the prosecutors is now running for the U.S. House as a Democrat in Virginia’s newly carved 7th Congressional District.

Oops! That “newly carved” district under Governess Spanberger’s gerrymandering scheme has been put on hold by the courts.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, released documents about the anti-Catholic targeting. He released texts exchanged in 2021 between two prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

The same prosecutors later joined special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and prosecution of President Trump.

The texts date back to the weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when the Justice Department began an unprecedented investigation to prosecute people who were on the Capitol grounds or inside the building that day.

Think about that. Department of Justice lawyers thinking about prosecuting Catholic nuns over the Capitol kerfuffle, nuns who did not enter the Capitol building itself, only a few weeks into the term of that famously Catholic president. Any new Administration lawyers ought to have had some real pause in going after nuns, unless they already knew that the President was a doddering old fool.

In a February 2021 text, Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston wrote to a colleague that she had spotted nuns “near the oath keepers” in a New York Times photo of the Capitol riot.

“I would like to take a special assignment of finding and prosecuting them,” she wrote to J.P. Cooney, then chief of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Fraud, Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section.

“I’m with you,” he responded, “although I’d like to prosecute any nun who still wears the head habit.”

Ms. Gaston responded, “hahaha.”

“There was also a catholic priest in there,” Mr. Cooney added to the exchange. “He came to perform exorcisms. He has been suspended by his diocese, it’s somewhere in the Midwest, I think.”

Hat tip to The Western Journal for the link to the Times.

This is about the weaponization of government law enforcement agencies against believing Catholics. I’m old enough to remember the exchange between Center For American Progress fellow John Halpin and Hillary Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri, in the e-mails hacked by Wikileaks:

Mr Halpin: Many of the most powerful elements of the conservative movement are all Catholic (many converts) …they must be attracted to the systematic thought and severely backwards gender relations.

Miss Palmieri: I imagine they think it is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. Their rich friends wouldn’t understand if they became evangelicals.

Of course, Mr Halpin and Miss Palmieri thought that their conversation was confidential, and wouldn’t be made public, but I hold that we should trust people when they tell us who they are. Miss Palmeiri stated that she didn’t recognize the e-mail and that she is, herself, Catholic, but I suspect that she and all of the others on the political left are Catholics like Joe Biden, Democrats first and Catholics a distant, distant second.

The insiders in Mrs Clinton’s campaign weren’t worried about Joe Biden, who was then the outgoing Vice President, and with his choice not to run for President in 2016, they probably thought that he was done with politics, and anticipated eight glorious years imposing Mrs Clinton’s policies. We have Donald Trump to thank for preventing that! But that doesn’t explain how the Department of Justice was thinking about going after Catholics, and actually surveilling “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potentially “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” after Mr Biden became President, unless they planned to either keep such secret from the Oval Office, or believed the President too mentally disconnected, as early as his first months in office, to do anything about it. After all, these kinds of things would be seriously career-limiting moves under any other circumstances.

We’ve all seen the expressions that other Democrats and the credentialed media — please pardon that redundancy — tell us that they were shocked, shocked! to find out that the President of the United States was in serious mental decline. But it’s clear that they knew, they all knew, and the evidence is coming out slowly that they probably knew from the very start.

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A very liberal UCC bishop wants to throw out major parts of the Bible Can anyone really be surprised?

One of the basic, underlying themes of Christianity, across all of the various denominations, is that the Bible is the word of God, given to authors who were divinely inspired by the Lord to bring his word to us mere, fallible mortals. Some Christians — former President Joe Biden, a (supposedly) devout and dedicated Catholic who nevertheless approves of prenatal infanticide, homosexuality, same-sex ‘marriage,’ transgenderism, racial discrimination, and government spying on the Catholics he doesn’t like being the most obvious example — like to ignore the parts of the Bible that they do not like, and some, but almost all accept the premise that the Bible is the Lord’s instructions to mankind.

Note that I wrote “almost all,” because that leaves room for Yvette Flunder, “the senior pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ (UCC) in Oakland, California, as well as the Presiding Bishop of The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries,” who apparently does not accept that premise. Many parts of the Bible need to be thrown out, superseded by a third Testament, because she just plain doesn’t like what the first two Testaments say! Continue reading →

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The seriousness of the surge in Catholic conversions

As a somewhat frequent participant in Catholic discussions on Twitter — I still refuse to call it 𝕏, the dumbest rebranding of the 21st century — I’ve been seeing a ton of posts about the surge in Catholic converts. Apparently, the algorithms see what we like, and send more of the same our way!  Many tweets about people’s individual conversions cheered me, but the one by Chrissie Mayr, screen captured at the right, seemed far more important to me. Miss Mayr pointed out what not everyone knows: unlike our Protestant brethren, who basically welcome everyone into their churches as members as soon as they walk in the door, conversion to Catholicism is a process, one which involves serious time and education into the beliefs held and requirements of becoming Catholic.

Miss Mayr told us that she initially found the process of OCIA, Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, intimidating, and it certainly can be.  OCIA is not meant to be intimidating, but I suppose I can see where some might see it that way. But it is intended to show aspiring Catholics what being Catholic really means, and to what they planned to commit. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the sacrament of Reconciliation — confession and absolution — and the need for an examination of conscience. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and Apostolic Succession. We want aspiring Catholics to understand the real reverence of the Eucharist, the heart of every Mass. We want aspiring Catholics to not only be proud of being Catholic, but to understand why they should be proud of it.

I’m old enough to remember the surge of “Jesus freaks” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were, essentially, non-denominational Protestants, and the passion and fad of such soon faded. The recent surge in conversion to Catholicism entails as orderliness that the Jesus freaks never had, and we hope that OCIA brings that orderliness and with it, a more durable commitment.

OCIA is a process which has the catechumens coming to Mass every Sunday, not only for the Mass, but for their instruction. This is a subtle, or perhaps not-so-subtle means of instilling in them the habit of getting out of bed on Sunday morning and coming to church. One thing too infrequently acknowledged is that attendance at church is a habit, and the more often you do get up rather than sleeping in, the easier it is to get up the next Sunday. For me, especially during colder weather, there are some Sundays that it’s really hard to get out of our nice, warm, comfortable bed, but it’s a habit, and I do it anyway. On both Palm Sunday, when the bedroom was cool due to the window being open, and Easter, when it was just plain cold, our bed was just so very nice, but yes, I got up anyway, and went to Mass. There’s a point at which you are more encouraged to get up and go to Mass because you want to keep your attendance record spotless.

Will the recent surge in Catholic conversions hold? Will our Church see more Catholics staying Catholic, more Catholics in the pews every Sunday morning? Only the Lord knows the answer to that, but I believe we have reason to hope.