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Saturday, February 17, 2018
Friday, February 16, 2018
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil - Crisis Magazine
Leo XIII Knew Socialism Would Fail Because it was Evil - Crisis Magazine: It is generally held that Catholic Social Teaching begins with Pope Leo XIII’s masterly encyclical, Rerum Novarum (1891). That, as I’ve tried to show, is a dreadful mistake. Pope Leo considered it his duty to apply to current concerns the constant teaching of the Church and of the word of God. Like Thomas Aquinas, the …
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Legal Rationalizations for the Slaughter of Holy Innocents - Crisis Magazine
Legal Rationalizations for the Slaughter of Holy Innocents - Crisis Magazine: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) “Upon You I was cast from birth; You have been my God from my mother’s womb.” (Psalm 22:5) Last week fourteen Catholic senators joined those who voted against the proposed law that would have prohibited …
Preparing for a God Encounter this Lent - Crisis Magazine
Preparing for a God Encounter this Lent - Crisis Magazine: Lent, the penitential season of prayer, self-examination, and repentance prepares us for the celebration of Easter and our heart’s deepest desire: an encounter with the risen Lord. Few songs convey that longing like Paul Baloche’s Open the Eyes of My Heart. Over half of the lyrics consist of the title appeal, followed by the reason: …
Pope Francis and the Cardinal Mindszenty Treatment in China - Crisis Magazine
Pope Francis and the Cardinal Mindszenty Treatment in China - Crisis Magazine: Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty was a hero of the Cold War, persecuted by communists and ultimately abandoned by his Church. Beginning in 1956, after Red Army tanks rolled into Hungary, Mindszenty spent 15 years in voluntary confinement at the U.S. embassy in Budapest. He spurned repeated requests to leave Hungary and his flock. In 1971, he …
Sunday, February 11, 2018
1945 The Big Three at Yalta
On February 11, 1945, a week of intensive bargaining
by the leaders of the three major Allied powers ends in Yalta, a Soviet resort
town on the Black Sea. It was the second conference of the “Big Three” Allied
leaders–U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin–and the war had progressed mightily
since their last meeting, which had taken place in Tehran in late 1943.
What was then called the Crimea
conference was held at the old summer palace of Czar Nicholas II on the
outskirts of Yalta, now a city in the independent Ukraine. With victory over
Germany three months away, Churchill and Stalin were more intent on dividing
Europe into zones of political influence than in addressing military
considerations. Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation
administered by the three major powers and France and was to be thoroughly
demilitarized and its war criminals brought to trial. The Soviets were to
administer those European countries they liberated but promised to hold free
elections. The British and Americans would oversee the transition to democracy
in countries such as Italy, Austria, and Greece.
Final plans were made for the
establishment of the United Nations, and a charter conference was scheduled to
begin in San Francisco in April.
A frail President Roosevelt, two
months from his death, concentrated his efforts on gaining Soviet support for
the U.S. war effort against Japan. The secret U.S. atomic bomb project had not
yet tested a weapon, and it was estimated that an amphibious attack against
Japan could cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. After being assured
of an occupation zone in Korea, and possession of Sakhalin Island and other
territories historically disputed between Russia and Japan, Stalin agreed to
enter the Pacific War within two to three months of Germany’s surrender.
Most of the Yalta accords
remained secret until after World War II, and the items that were revealed,
such as Allied plans for Germany and the United Nations, were generally
applauded. Roosevelt returned to the United States exhausted, and when he went
to address the U.S. Congress on Yalta he was no longer strong enough to stand
with the support of braces. In that speech, he called the conference “a turning
point, I hope, in our history, and therefore in the history of the world.” He
would not live long enough, however, to see the iron curtain drop along the
lines of division laid out at Yalta. In April, he traveled to his cottage in
Warm Springs, Georgia, to rest and on April 12 died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
On July 16, the United States
successfully tested an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. On August 6, it
dropped one of these deadly weapons on Hiroshima, Japan. Two days later, true
to its pledge at Yalta, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan. The next
day, the United States dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and the Soviets
launched a massive offensive against the Japanese in Manchuria. On August 15,
the combination of the U.S. atomic attacks and the Soviet offensive forced a
Japanese surrender. At the end of the month, U.S. troops landed in Japan
unopposed.
When the full text of the Yalta
agreements were released in the years following World War II, many criticized
Roosevelt and Churchill for delivering Eastern Europe and North Korea into
communist domination by conceding too much to Stalin at Yalta. The Soviets
never allowed free elections in postwar Eastern Europe, and communist North
Korea was sharply divided from its southern neighbor.
Eastern Europe, liberated and
occupied by the Red Army, would have become Soviet satellites regardless of
what had happened at Yalta. Because of the atomic bomb, however, Soviet
assistance was not needed to defeat the Japanese. Without the Soviet invasion
of the Japanese Empire in the last days of World War II, North Korea and
various other Japanese-held territories that fell under Soviet control
undoubtedly would have come under the sway of the United States. At Yalta,
however, Roosevelt had no guarantee that the atomic bomb would work, and so he
sought Soviet assistance in what was predicted to be the costly task of
subduing Japan. Stalin, more willing than Roosevelt to sacrifice troops in the
hope of territorial gains, happily accommodated his American ally, and by the
end of the war had considerably increased Soviet influence in East Asia.
The Miracles of Lourdes
Oldest of six children born to Francois and Louise Casterot, and grew up very poor. Hired out as a servant from age 12 to 14. Shepherdess. On 11 February 1858, around the time of her first Communion, she received a vision of the Virgin; her own account of it is in the Readings section below. She received seventeen more in the next five months, and was led to a spring of healing waters. She moved into a house with the Sisters of Nevers at Lourdes where she lived, worked, and learned to read and write. The sisters cared for the sick and indigent, and at age 22 they admitted Bernadette into their order since she was both. Always sick herself, and often mistreated by her superiors, she died with a prayer for Mary‘s aid. Since the appearances of Mary to young Bernadette in 1858, more than 200 million people have visited the shrine of Lourdes.
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