Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Die Welt reports:

Bissattacke kurz nach Mitternacht: Eine psychisch labile Frau hat an Weihnachten versucht, den Papst in den Hals zu beißen. Das meldete eine Schweizer Zeitung unter Berufung auf einen Sprecher der Schweizer Garde. Die Frau wollte sich demnach mit dem Biss für die Äußerungen Benedikts über Homosexuelle rächen.
Bite attack shortly after midnight: On Christmas [...]

[Read more →]

Great minds think alike; compare yesterday’s post:
Chesterton: “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
 

[Read more →]

As Ambrose Bierce wrote: “Conservative: a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.” In my darker moments I think this applies to every reform, including Vatican II. But I think that most Catholics would agree, the changes in the Church, at least in [...]

[Read more →]

On dotCommonweal someone commented

The question that occurs to me is that some things now considered “intrinsically evil,” such as slavery, can be recognized as evil at the time, if not by the perpetrators, at least by the victims. But it seems like other “intrinsic evils” (mainly those involving sexual behavior) are kind of like victimless [...]

[Read more →]

The Jonathan Livingstone Seagull variety of Catholicism is doing well in the episcopate.
 
The Vatican-appointed (let is not forget) Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton told the Catholic Herald: 

You can’t talk to young people about salvation. What’s salvation? What does salvation mean? My eternal soul? You can only talk to young people in young people’s [...]

[Read more →]

The National Post reports

Babies Zuma Nesta Rock and Bronx Mowgli, you’re in the minority. Most parents abandoned unusual names for their children, opting instead for traditional names, according to a U.S. survey.
The top boy’s name for the year remained Aiden, followed by Jayden, Ethan and Jacob with classic names like Matthew, Jack, Michael, Alexander, Daniel [...]

[Read more →]

Doctors are held to a higher standard than priests are. The National Post reports: 

A surgeon who engaged in sexual acts with four women who came to him for weight loss surgeries, including twin sisters, had his licence revoked today.
Dr. Jacobo Joffe, who practiced out of Scarborough Grace hospital, pleaded no contest to allegations of sexual [...]

[Read more →]

In Montreal Concordia University has managed to have five paintings owned by Max Stern and stolen by the Nazis returned to their rightful heirs. When Stern was in Nazi Germany before he could flee, the Nazis forced him to sell some of his art to an “Aryan” dealer and then confiscated the rest after he [...]

[Read more →]

We have reached the point where investors will pay the US government to keep thir money safe - Treasuries are paying a negative interest rate. It has been about 70 years since this happened last.
The whole world has a touching faith in the US dollar - I hope these true believers are in the right [...]

[Read more →]

Catholic Democrats complain about tax reductions – Americans are undertaxed, they say. Pope Benedict has criticized off-shore banks as a source of the financial crisis But in Kaiman and Abel, Timothy Ridley, the former head of a bank in the Cayman Islands, points out 

Der Vatikan hat selbst 1929 einen Deal mit Mussolini geschlossen, wonach er [...]

[Read more →]

What Diogenes was expecting to find an honest man when he cast light on the doings of the governor of Illinois?
Obama’s Chicago connections should keep the FBI busy for a term or two.
 

[Read more →]

Sunny von Bulow died yesterday. She had been in an insulin coma for almost 28 years. Her second husband, Claus von Bulow, was convicted in one trial, but after employing Alan Dershowitz, was acquitted in a second trial of attempting to murder his wife.
The articles on her death do not mention the curious involvment of the the sexually abusive Rev. [...]

[Read more →]