Category Archives: Freedom of Religion

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The slow growth of the Catholic Church

Stations of the Cross, St Elizabeth’s Church, Lent 2024.

Our own parish, St Elizabeth’s, is too small to draw any conclusions from seeing new members, but we currently have two new attendees taking OCIA, Order of Christian Initiation for Adults, classes, and a third young man showed up last Sunday and is interested. For a parish with only 24 families, this is a very big deal, but statistically invalid as far as any big picture is concerned.

But our parish isn’t the only one seeing new members:

Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse ā€” driven by pandemic, internet, ā€˜laxā€™ alternatives

By Rikki Schlott | Thursday, April 17, 2025 | 11:00 AM EDT

Sydney Johnston grew up in a nondenominational Christian household ā€” but now the Upper West Side millennial is a devout Catholic.

ā€œThereā€™s just something so beautiful and transcendent about the rituals and the ancient history in the Catholic Mass thatā€™s been preserved,ā€ Johnston, 30, told The Post. ā€œThe church really communicates a degree of reverence that I didnā€™t find in the more liberal, laissez-faire approach of nondenominational churches.ā€

Confirmed in December 2024 at the Church of Notre Dame in Morningside Heights, Johnston is one of a growing number of young people turning to the Catholic Church from other denominations, religions and even no faith at all.

According to the National Catholic Register, some dioceses are reporting year-over-year increases of 30% to 70% in new converts. The Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, for instance, experienced a 72% jump in converts just from 2023 to 2024.

There’s much more at the original, and the New York Post, our nation’s second oldest continuously published daily newspaper, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, is not hidden behind a paywall, so you can follow the link freely.

Yes, I had heard, anecdotally, of a surge in Catholicism, which some have attributed to the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the accession of Pope Leo XIV, an American from Chicago, but the Post article predates both of those events. But it was the following article which really caught my attention:

More than one in three Catholic ordinations are former Anglican clergy, says new report

More than one third of priestly ordinations in the Catholic Church in England and Wales from 1992 to 2024 were former Anglican clergy, according to a report published today.

Ruth Gledhill | Thursday, November 20, 2025

Around 700 former clergy and religious of the Church of England, Church in Wales or Scottish Episcopal Church have been received into the Catholic Church since 1992, including 16 former Anglican bishops and two ā€œcontinuingā€ Anglican bishops. From 1992 to 2025, five Anglican permanent deacons and 486 Anglican priests were ordained in the Catholic Church.

The report shows that 29 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy, while 35 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 1992 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

Convert Clergy in the Catholic Church in Britain: The role of the St Barnabas Society by Stephen Bullivant, Fernanda Mee and Janet Mellor is published by the St Barnabas Society and the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion, Ethics and Society at St Maryā€™s University, Twickenham.

Hyperlink not in the original, but added by me. The original is a 24 page long .pdf file, and is available without charge.

It reveals that by comparison, just 9 per cent of diocesan priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy and 19 per cent of combined diocesan and Ordinariate priestly ordinations from 2015 to 2024 in England and Wales were former Anglican clergy.

The Church of England General Synod voted to ordain women priests in 1992, and the first women were priested in 1994

In the foreword, Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Vincent Nichols, acknowledges that the movement of clergy from the Church of England into full communion with the Catholic Church in recent times is a story of many parts and says that until now, those parts have not been drawn together.

In July of 1980, His Holiness Pope St John Paul II issued the Pastoral Provision, allowing Anglican/Episcopal priests who convert to Catholicism to be ordained as Catholic priests, even if they are married. The Anglican/Episcopal female priests can convert to Catholicism, but cannot be ordained as Catholic priests.

The Church of England has been falling and failing for a long time now. The Catholic Herald reported, last April, that, driven by younger churchgoers, Catholics were on a pace to outnumber Anglicans in England, for the first time since King Henry VIII forced the Reformation on the island nation. Somewhere in Heaven, St Thomas More is smiling.

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Kristallnacht in New York City? It’s not so far-fetched! As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

The hatred for the Jews continues in New York City. Whether they were encouraged by the election of Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s next mayor is speculative, but it certainly seems probable. They don’t want American Jews to emigrate to Israel, calling them “settler colonialists,” but they also try to make life miserable for Jews in the United States.

From The Times of Israel:

Anti-Zionist groups announce protest outside Manhattan synagogue

By Luke Tress | Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Anti-Zionist groups announce a protest for tomorrow at New York Cityā€™s Park East Synagogue.

The protesters are demonstrating against an event at the synagogue hosted by Nefesh Bā€™nefesh, an organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.

Internal hyperlink not in the original, but added by this site.

ā€œNo settlers on stolen land,ā€ say advertisements for the protest on social media, branding the event a ā€œsettler recruiting fair.ā€

Nefesh Bā€™nefesh does not direct immigrants to settlements; anti-Zionist activists often brand all Jewish Israelis as ā€œsettlers.ā€

Yet the protesting groups are here, in the United States, in New York City, which is land taken from the Indians by our settler colonialist ancestors.

The protest is led by the Pal-Awda activist group and is shared by other anti-Zionist organizations such as the cityā€™s branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, Writers Against the War on Gaza, student groups from around the city and individual activists with large followings.

Pal-Awda is a group calling for the so-called “right of return” for Palestinians to lands within Israel proper, the same excuse given by Yassir Arafat for rejecting the 2001 initiative by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to create a ‘Palestinian’ state in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. Like so many of the irredentists, they want their “From the River To the Sea” ‘Palestine,’ with the Jews expelled . . . or just plain slaughtered.

The hyperlinks were not in the original, but were added by us.

The National Lawyers Guild, a nonprofit, sent an email to its members asking for volunteer legal observers to attend the event. The observers serve to provide legal defense for protesters against police. The guild is anti-Israel and put out a statement in support of the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, the day after it happened.

The image to the left was attached to the National Lawyers Guild statement.

Who are the “National Lawyers Guild”? They are just another leftist ‘progressive’ group who hate the United States — despite being headquartered here — as they tell us in their About Us page. But one wonders: did these oh-so-progressive people, saying that they “actively educate, litigate, and truth-seek toward the end of social justice,” and “reaffirming the legitimacy of the struggle of people for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle,” mean to include the rape, murder, and kidnapping of unarmed people, including children?

Their statement was issued on October 8, 2023, the day after the massacre of 1,199 innocent people and the kidnapping of 251 others.Ā  The numbers hadn’t firmed up on that next day, but The New York Times had several different stories on the attack dated on the seventh. The “National Lawyers Guild” cannot have been unaware of just what the attackers had done. And, of course, they chose to post their support for the ‘Palestinians’ before the Israel Defense Forces had moved into Gaza to respond to the Hamas attack

There have been thousands of anti-Israel protests in New York City since the Hamas attack, the NYPD has said.

Demonstrations outside synagogues and in heavily Jewish neighborhoods are rare, but tend to be especially vitriolic. Park East is a prominent synagogue in an area with a large Jewish population.

Yup, anti-Semitism. These fine people could have held their protests anywhere, but they chose to protest in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, around the synagogues which are the most visible symbols of Judaism. They deliberately chose locations to try to intimidate Jewish Americans.

As long as their protests remain peaceful, they are protected by our First Amendment, and its provisions protecting freedom of speech and peaceable assembly. But make no mistake about it: these people are total scum.

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Christians cannot hate Judaism without hating themselves

You know, this really pisses me off. No, not Vice President J D Vance visiting the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a place where I have been and found amazing and inspiring, but the utterly asinine comments of (supposedly) good Americans, some of whom even profess to be Christians.

I have seen several different tweets about this, and they are absolutely filled with haters in the comments. Some are from Protestants, bemoaning the fact that the Vice President is Catholic, even though the Church is managed jointly by Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Christian authorities. I saw one which slammed him for having married a Hindu, and many which berated him for also visiting the Western Wall, the holiest site for Jews.

But the Western Wall is also a site for Christians. It is the exposed remnants of the second Temple in Jerusalem, where Jesus himself walked and taught and prayed. How can it be wrong for any Christian to appreciate a place where Jesus was?

There is much of the Old City which is lost to time, deeply buried under two millennia of accumulated debris. The Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross through the Old City, is paved with stones on which Jesus never trod, and the buildings you can see are primarily Byzantine, not from the first century. But the Western Wall, though the ground is paved, has been excavated to the level of the first century.

Christianity is built on the foundation of Judaism. Our Old Testament books are the ancient Jewish scriptures. We don’t ignore them, and at least in a Catholic Mass — I cannot write knowledgeably about how our Separated Brethren conduct their services — we have one reading from the Old Testament along with a responsorial song from Psalms, much of which are the writings of King David, roughly a thousand years before Jesus.

That Jesus was Jewish is attested to in the Bible, which tells us that the Holy Family made the annual pilgrimage to the Temple for Passover. We know that must have been a common thing for Jews in the first century, because the Holy Family had to have travelled by some sort of caravan, or they couldn’t have returned to Nazareth without knowing their 12-year-old son wasn’t with them. We know that Jesus told the crowd, in the Sermon on the Mount, that not a single letter of the old Jewish law would be wiped away.

Jesus himself frequently referenced the Jewish scriptures, and was a Jew from a Jewish family; Christians cannot (rationally) hate Judaism without hating themselves. No real Christian can visit the Old City and not be moved.

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Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ā€˜Peace be to this house.ā€™ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ā€˜The kingdom of God has come near to you.ā€™

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was ā€œto make something wholeā€. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading →

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Apparently I am a “Domestic Violent Extremist”, or so Joe Biden and his minions would have classified me

Did you know that I’m a “Domestic Violent Extremist”? I didn’t know I was, but that’s apparently how the Biden Administration would have classified me, if they knew who a small fry like me was. Continue reading →

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When Will Bunch refers to a prelate as Archbishop Rush Limbaugh, you know that prelate must be a good one!

The Most Reverend Charles Chaput, OFMCap, was appointed to become the Archbishop of Philadelphia on July 19, 2011, in part due to his aggressive and responsible handing of priestly sex abuse cases. The Archdiocese had serious problems in that regard, under former Archbishops Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua and, to a lesser extent, Justin Cardinal Rigali. One would have thought that such would have made The Philadelphia Inquirer’s far-left columnist Will Bunch happy, but no, Mr Bunch preferred to refer to him as Archbishop Rush Limbaugh.

Actually, being Archbishop Rush Limbaugh, someone dedicated to the letter of the law, would be a good thing!

And today? The distinguished columnist decides to tout an OpEd by Alfred G. Mueller II, an assistant dean of the William T. Daly School of General Studies and Graduate Education at Stockton University, and it seems that Dr Mueller doesn’t like Archbishop Emeritus Chaput very much. Continue reading →

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Harvard admits to anti-Semitism on campus The real question: what will the University do about it?

When I don’t have a good photo for an article, perhaps just a picture of my morning coffee being made will suffice!

We noted, just three weeks ago, how Harvard University, the oldest and most prestigious institution of higher learning in our great nation, rather than at least negotiate with the Trump Administration over policies to end blatant anti-Semitism on campus, was choosing to double-down on discrimination instead.

Harvard is, of course, a private school, so the government cannot order it to comply, but as a private institution the government is not obligated to fund it, either. But that doesn’t mean that the university doesn’t have to address its problems. From The Atlantic:

Harvard Begins to Confront Its Anti-Semitism Problem

Continue reading →

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Shouldn’t a professional writer who ‘wonders’ about something know enough to Google the answer?

While doing research for my previous post, Requiescat in Pace, Pope Francis, I figured that I would check on the very lovely Amanda Marcotte, a loudly self-proclaimed atheist, to see what drivel she had written. As it happens, at least as of 8:00 PM on Easter Monday, our fanatic (neveau) Philadelphian hadn’t written about the Holy Father’s passing, but in a slightly older, April 18th article, I found this commenter on religion having said this:

Do Catholics really fast on Fridays during Lent, I had to wonder.

One thing is certain: she didn’t wonder enough to actually check it out! Continue reading →

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Requiescat in Pace, Pope Francis

My Twitter — I refuse to call it š• — feed was full of chortling posts claiming that the Vatican denied Vice President J D Vance a meeting with Pope Francis, sending the Vatican’s second-ranking official instead, in what the left loudly proclaimed was a deliberate snub to Mr Vance.

That’s not quite what it was.

The story behind JD Vanceā€™s unlikely visit with Pope Francis

Vance and Francis had publicly disagreed in recent months on immigration policies and other aspects of church teaching.

Continue reading →