This is what is bad about separation of Church and State, then add Religious Liberty and the queers take over.

ROME (Reuters) Italy’s parliament approved same-sex civil unions and gave some rights to unmarried heterosexual couples on Wednesday (May 11) after Prime Minister Matteo Renzi called a confidence vote to force the bill into law.

Italy is the last major Western country to legally recognize gay couples and an original draft law had to be heavily diluted due to divisions in Renzi’s ruling majority.

The bill had faced stiff opposition from Catholic groups who said it went too far, while gay activists said it was too timid. MORE

The Birthday of the Church

The Acts of the Apostles recounts the story of the original Pentecost (Acts 2).

Jews from all over were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish feast. On that Sunday, ten days after the Ascension of Our Lord, the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary were gathered in the Upper Room, where they had seen Christ after His Resurrection: Continue reading →

Northern Ireland’s Attorney General, John Larkin, has told the Court of Appeal that the judgement in the case against a Christian-run bakery that refused to make a cake bearing a slogan supporting gay marriage was wrong.

Last year, Ashers Baking Company was found to have discriminated against a customer who placed the order in 2014.

It is trying to overturn the ruling.MORE

Victims of sexual abuse by priests, advocates say, still feel alone. That painful sense of solitude persists even 14 years after the Boston Globe documented a massive cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, setting off a wave of exposés across the country that continue until this day. Even now, some victims think that they were the only one hurt by a particular priest. MORE

Mexico is allowing Panama to dump nearly 4,000 Cuban migrants on the U.S. border, revealing the hypocrisy of Mexican officials as they attack Trump’s immigration policies.

The Cubans have been stranded in Panama after Nicaragua closed its border last year, preventing them from traveling north to the U.S., so the Panama government asked Mexican officials if they can simply fly the Cubans just south of the U.S./Mexico border. MORE

Two weeks shy of 90, Yohanan Elihai is feverishly working in his Jerusalem study on updating his Arabic-Hebrew dictionary, published by the Ministry of Defense over a decade ago. That dictionary contains 5,000 words and 10,000 sentences; but he would like it to conform to his famous Arabic-English Olive Tree Dictionary, published in 2007, which contains 8,000 words and 17,000 sentences. Widely acknowledged as the most authoritative Arabic teacher in the country, Elihai is also the author of numerous textbooks and dictionaries on the colloquial dialect of the Palestinians. He is also a Catholic monk. MORE

UK police arrested a man for making a joke YouTube video about his girlfriend’s pet dog being a Nazi.

Liberals, stop being so defensive. That’s the message of Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet in a new post at Balkinization, titled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” The problem, according to Tushnet, is that liberals have been too defensivewhen it comes to advancing their agenda in the courts.

Now that President Barack Obama has reshaped the federal judiciary, liberal causes can win easily in court. And now that Justice Antonin Scalia has died, “judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.” MORE

The U.S. Justice Department is putting the feelings of transgenders — men who think they are women and women who think they are men — above the privacy rights of the vast majority of people who don’t contest the biological facts of who they actually are.

“And what we must not do, what we must never do, is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans for something that they cannot control and deny what makes them human,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said on Monday.

“[N]one of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone that they are not.” MORE

A sculpture of a crucified frog threatened with eviction from Bolzano’s new modern art museum after being condemned by the pope, the minister of culture and local right-wing politicians is staying where it is.

Today the museum’s governing committee decided “by a clear majority” to keep it on display. PICTURE INAPPROPRIATE

MINNEAPOLIS –  It’s been nearly three years since Minnesota opened a path for lawsuits by victims of long-ago childhood sexual abuse.

In that time, more than 800 people have brought abuse claims against churches, the Boy Scouts, schools and a children’s theater company. Previously unknown offenders have been exposed. Two Roman Catholic dioceses have filed bankruptcy. Lists of credibly accused priests and thousands of documents have been released. And the heightened scrutiny played a part in the downfall of two bishops MORE

Veiled women, incense, Gregorian chants, kneeling, standing, kneeling again, long periods of silence — think all of this is a scene from a Catholic Mass in 1950?

It was then, to be sure — but it is now also happening every Sunday, and in some places every day, in churches all over the United States. The Latin Mass of years gone by is becoming more popular again.

As a convert to the Catholic faith, I was drawn to the Catholic Church by the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the fullness of the faith, and the path of truth with a capital “T” through the ages. I thirsted for the Eucharist during every Mass I attended even before my First Communion and Confirmation at the Easter Vigil in 2012. MORE

More than a dozen members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards were killed this week during an attack by militants in northern Syria in what shows Tehran’s deep involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Iran has been one of President Bashar Assad’s strongest backers and has, along with Lebanon’s Iran-backed militant Hezbollah group, sent fighters to battle on the government’s side. MORE

Vol 9 Issue 19 ~
Editor: Rev. Fr. Courtney Edward Krier
May 7, 2016 ~ Saint Stanislaus, opn!

1. Baptism: Means of Salvation (67)
2. Sunday after Ascension
3. St. Michael
4. Christ in the Home (41)
5. Articles and notices

Dear Reader:

Please accept a brief newsletter. The Novena to the Holy Ghost as begun as the Church prepares for the feast of Pentecost, but May also means First Communions, Confirmations, and May crownings. The Church is alive in presenting her children with opportunities of grace and the faithful should take advantage.  Continue reading →