January 6 Tallahassee, FL — A Florida Supreme Court's 5-2 ruling ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which used public money to pay tuition for students who have left failing schools. The ruling ratified the anti-Catholic Blaine Amendment that was written into Florida's Constitution. The Blaine amendment comes out of the 19th century. Its purpose was to deny [...]
BOOKS January 19 Raymond Khoury's novel The Last Templar was released. The novel is about a couple that tracks down the diaries of Jesus. The diaries reveal that Jesus' Resurrection, miracles and the idea of salvation are all a fabrication. January 31 Steve Berry's novel The Third Secret was released. The novel is about a couple that discovers that Church [...]
On September 12, Pope Benedict XVI lectured at the University of Regensburg in Germany. During this lecture, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said, "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith [...]
Activists: A curmudgeon in Warwick, New York, kicked up a fuss about a "Breakfast with Santa" fundraiser held each year by the PTA of Sanfordville Elementary School. One parent claimed that the popular fundraiser, which is held on a Saturday and is completely optional, is offensive to non-Christians because it includes a visit from Santa Claus.In [...]
January 7 Yonkers, NY — Vandals shattered a five-foot-tall statue of St. Bartholomew in front of St. Bartholomew's Catholic Church. The statue was valued at $2,500. January 8 Baton Rogue, LA — Six hundred crosses, erected by the Catholic Life Center to memorialize aborted fetuses, were pulled from the ground at the Center and thrown into bushes and [...]
"The Catholic Church is going to own the month of April." That's what I told Fox News anchor Shepard Smith on April 2, the day Pope John Paul II passed away. Events soon validated my point. I was speaking at the University of Notre Dame on March 31 when news reports about the impending death of [...]
January 3 Madison, WI—In a split decision, a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a 2002 suit brought by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The panel found that the city of La Crosse's sale of its Ten Commandments monument to the Fraternal Order of Eagles (the monument's original donor) was [...]
January New York, NY—The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, headquarters for the Episcopal Diocese of New York, featured a South African art exhibit by Diane Victor titled, "The Eight Mary's." A writer named C.J. DeStefano reported that the exhibit portrayed the Blessed Mother with "Blood cascading from between her legs, as a wire hanger dangled [...]
January 18 Dawn Eden Goldstein, a copy editor with the New York Post, was fired when it was discovered that she ran a pro-life website in her spare time. In an interview with Gilbertmagazine, Goldstein claimed that chief copy editor Barry Gross told her, "Some people already think the Post is conservative, and we don't need New York readers also [...]
This cartoon obscenely assaults Our Blessed Mother, Jesus and the pope. That a mainstream newspaper would dare to print this shows how debased the journalism industry has become. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 2005) The assessment of U.S. seminaries by the Vatican focused on seminarians, not priests or bishops. The point was to assess whether homosexual behavior [...]
