Help a Byzantine Parish in Slovakia

“Most people know that Slovakia is a predominantly Catholic country. However, few people know that in addition to the almost 70% of the population who are Latin rite Catholics, there are also roughly 4% who belong to the small but very active community of the Eastern-rite, or Greek-Catholic Church, who celebrate according to the Byzantine rite but are in full unity with Rome.”

(My pastor, Fr Miron, is a wonderful married Slovak priest)

Read the rest: http://www.churchinneed.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6566&news_iv_ctrl=1002

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Just What We Need

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Utilitarian Torture

As predicted, the Right is more enthusiastic than ever about torture, er, I mean “enhanced interrogation”.

The “products of conception”,” collateral damage”, “enhanced interrogation”. Mankind cannot bear much truth; there is a need to hide it beneath nice-sounding words.

Last night during the first of the Republican candidate debates, “prolife” former senator Rick Santorum made the point: torture worked; it led to Osama bin Laden’s death.

This appeal to utilitarian logic to justify an act is unsettling. Indeed, if it is true that torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, what of it? If that is our only criterion, why didn’t we simply capture one of his small children and torture him until bin Laden surrendered?

If you think that is extreme, remember that John Yoo, former legal advisor to George W Bush, speculated that crushing the testicles of the small son of a terror suspect could be justified.

We have fallen so far it is hard to see how we can ever recover what has been lost.

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Melkite Patriarch Warns West Against Stirring Arab Unrest

“Our Arab countries are not ready for revolutions, and not even for democracy of the European kind and model,” the patriarch explained in a recent letter to Western leaders. “I am asking the West not to encourage revolutions unconditionally here and there in the Arab world.”

Read the rest: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/dont-encourage-arab-revolutions-melkite-patriarch-tells-western-leaders/

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Remembering the Southern Agrarians

A fine article from The American Conservative:

 
 The Agrarians are all fading names now—12 men who shared for
 a while the illusion that they could stop the inevitable 
unraveling of a traditional society. Like Cassandra, they 
predicted the future and no one listened. Lytle said in his 
last years, “We were better prophets than we knew. Things are 
worse now than we ever imagined. The problem was, no one 
believed that the society they knew could ever be taken from
 them. Now it’s gone forever.” Perhaps the greater tragedy—more 
modern than Aeschylean—is that people today don’t even know it existed.

The rest of the article can only be read by subscribers; when it is available I will post it….

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