Along Fremont's city limit, on 100 acres of rolling hills just off Interstate 680 and Sheridan Road, a group of Catholic lay parishioners plans to build a $20 million shrine and home for pregnant women, elderly and homeless people.

But its founder, Union City resident Thelma Orias, is keeping mum about the specifics. After numerous requests, she declined to comment, saying only that the project is "inspired by God."

The group, known as the Divine Mercy Eucharistic Society, was formed in 1990 and traces its roots to Saint Faustina Kowalska, an uneducated Polish nun. Kowalska saw a vision of Jesus with rays of light and received a series of revelations to spread throughout the world, according to her adorers.

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A recent statement by the Florida Catholic Conference asked Governor Jeb Bush to save death row inmate, Clarence Hill, convicted of shooting a police officer to death during a robbery of a Pensacola bank in 1982, from lethal injection and to stay his execution. The Florida Bishops state they are disheartened over this execution, as there are unresolved constitutional issues in regard to lethal injection. (Hill was executed Wednesday night.)

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Where were the Florida Catholic Bishops' disheartened pleas for Terri Schiavo's life? Why did they not ask for a stay of her execution? Where was the Bishops' equal dismay over the unresolved states and constitutional issues permitting euthanasia in Terri's case?

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The Catholic Church cannot remain silent in the face of the moral and political crisis Hungary finds itself, said the country’s bishops in a declaration that came on the same day as prayers were offered by Pope Benedict XVI.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, after Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany's admission that he lied about the country’s economy to win April's general election was leaked.

On Sept. 18, Hungary experienced its worst riots since its failed 1956 uprising against Soviet rule when thousands stormed the state television building. A reported hundreds of protesters and police were injured in three days of clashes.

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Pop singer Madonna on Thursday defended staging a mock crucifixion during her record-breaking "Confessions" world tour, saying it was not "anti-Christian, sacrilegious or blasphemous" -- but a plea for people to help one another.

What a crock....

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A spokeswoman for NBC television said earlier this week that the General Electric Co.-owned unit had not yet decided whether to include the scene in its November special.

But TV Guide Magazine on Thursday quoted NBC entertainment chief Kevin Reilly as saying that it probably would be in the show because Madonna felt strongly about it.

NBC hasn't decided yet? If that is becuase this is such a "tough call", there is something really wrong here.

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Pope Benedict XVI spoke publicly last month of the Catholic Church's deep environmental concerns. In doing so he did more than pursue his predecessors' stance on the issue; he reiterated the church's teaching about life -- in all its forms and stages. Of course, some who cheer the church's work in ecological matters object when the basic environmental credo of "protecting life" is applied to a human embryo or fetus.

For the church, the demand for social justice (that is, human dignity) and the primacy of life underpins its work in the environmental movement. From the papal office to national organizations of bishops to local parish garden clubs, Catholics stand with other Christian traditions, and those of many faiths, in working to reverse, or at least call attention to, such realities as global climate change, the toxic effects of certain home and landscaping products, and the accelerating extinction of entire species.

This is not always recognized among secular environmentalists, who, upon realizing that they have an ally in the church, may well admit surprise. Having written a column for over three years on the Catholic perspective of ecology, I can attest to many occasions when an environmental advocate needed an explanation as to exactly why the Catholic press was writing about wind turbines, mercury poisoning or hybrid automobiles.

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“Even as a supporter of Roe v. Wade, I am compelled to acknowledge that the language both sides use on this subject can be, unfortunately, misleading and unconstructive,� said Kerry, who insisted, “Instead of making enemies, we need to make progress.� Kerry blamed “excessive language� for polarizing Americans over abortion, and postulated that both sides can come together about issues like tax credits for adoptive parents, more government aid for working mothers, and universal health insurance.

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You might want to reference this earlier post......

OPEN LETTER TO BOB CASEY, JR.

Dear Mr. Casey:

When I lived in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, I voted with enthusiasm for your father as governor of Pennsylvania. You are now in a campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, and as a pro-life Catholic you are in a position to maintain your father’s legacy. But in order for you to do so, you will have to cut your ties to an anti-Catholic and pro-abortion organization, MoveOn.org.

According to The American Spectator Online, MoveOn.org has reportedly given your campaign $168,591. This is the same organization which, in an attempt last year to protest Republican efforts to change the filibuster rules governing federal court appointees, posted a picture of a smiling Pope Benedict XVI holding a gavel outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Above the picture was the following inscription:

God Already has a Job!

He does not need one on the Supreme Court.

Protect the Supreme Court Rules

In addition to its anti-Catholic record, MoveOn.org funds pro-abortion groups like the Feminist Majority Foundation. Indeed, when Samuel Alito was being considered for the U.S. Supreme Court, the Feminist Majority Foundation publicly protested that if Alito gets on the bench, the majority of the Court would be Roman Catholics. Waving this red flag smacks of bigotry.

Justice demands that you follow the lead of other candidates for public office and return the money that MoveOn.org has contributed. If Senator Hillary Clinton was honest enough to return money donated by Wal-Mart because she disagrees with its worker benefits program, surely you are well poised to return the contributions of MoveOn.org

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Huh? What is this about? I think that if one looks at the histtory carefully, Franco's dictatorship was not "Church-Backed".....

In a surprise announcement, the Socialist government on Friday said it had reached a new accord on how the Roman Catholic Church in Spain will be financed.

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The government had also announced that it would push for the Church to become far more self-financing. Both sides began talks on the issue in May following a call for a settlement from the justice minister in May last year.

Once a bastion of Roman Catholicism, Spain has become a predominantly lay society, particularly since the end of the Church-backed dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco in 1975.

The Spanish government separated formally from the Church under the 1978 Constitution, but it has nevertheless continued to finance the institution since 1979 under an agreement with the Vatican that allows taxpayers to contribute 0.52 percent of their income taxes if they choose.

Since 1989, however, these contributions have not matched church spending, and the government has made up the difference with an annual lump sum payment.

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I would love see some comments on this article.....

First things first: We support free expression. We believe that a wide variety of views that produce a wide variety of arguments is good for democracy and for our republic. We support the various lively but nonviolent ways in which those arguments occur.

This includes, for example, the decision of theater faculty at the University of Minnesota to stage the play "The Pope and the Witch" by Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo. It also includes the protesting of that decision by some Catholic organizations.

The competition of ideas is central to our faith in the U.S. system of governance. Ideas, and the institutions that embody them, should, over time, rise and fall on their merits.

By any measure, the Roman Catholic Church is one of the world's most enduring institutions. Not because it has always lived its highest ideals — like every other human institution, it hasn't — but because it has pursued them, and has competed effectively in the marketplace of human yearning. It has been both liberal and conservative, both liberating and constraining, in combinations that have sustained it.

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A Catholic lay chaplain who secretly helped an al-Qaeda terrorist suspect detained in a German prison was sentenced Tuesday to six months in jail for contempt of court.

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The man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 has warned current Pope Benedict XVI, whose remarks enraged Muslims last week, not to visit the predominantly Muslim and secular country in November, saying the pontiff's life could be in danger, the gunman's lawyer told AP.

"As a man who knows these things, I'm saying that your life is in danger; don't come to Turkey. I can't welcome you because I'm in prison," lawyer Mustafa Demirbag said Wednesday, quoting Mehmet Ali Agca, whose mental health has long been questioned.

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An Irish diplomat has been forced to flee Northern Ireland because of death threats from anti-Catholic extremists, the government said Wednesday.

Aine de Baroid was helping to build Irish government links with members of outlawed groups in Northern Ireland, particularly so-called "loyalist" paramilitary gangs rooted in the most impoverished Protestant districts of Belfast.

She fled Belfast in August after receiving death threats from members of the Ulster Defense Association, the largest paramilitary group in Northern Ireland with an estimated 3,000 members.

De Baroid was involved in developing contacts between the UDA and Irish President Mary McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic who has made outreach to Northern Ireland's Protestant majority a central theme of her presidency. McAleese and her husband, Martin, have publicly befriended a senior UDA commander, Jackie McDonald, in hopes of encouraging the UDA to disarm and embrace politics as part of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.

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Sister Leonella, a Catholic nun who devoted her life to helping the sick in Africa, used to joke there was a bullet with her name engraved on it in Somalia. When the bullet came, she used her last breaths to forgive those responsible.

"I forgive, I forgive," she whispered in her native Italian just before she died Sunday in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, Rev. Maloba Wesonga said at her memorial mass in Nairobi yesterday.

Sister Leonella's slaying, outside the hospital where she worked, raised concerns she and other foreigners killed in Somalia recently are victims of growing Islamic radicalism in the Horn of Africa country, where a hardline Muslim militia has been expanding its reach.

The shooting was not a random attack and could have been sparked by Muslim anger over recent remarks by Pope Benedict linking Islam and violence, said Willy Huber, regional head of the Austrian-financed hospital where the nun worked.

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Last week's lecture by Pope Benedict XVI that provoked angry protests in the Islamic world has also triggered a cry of protest in the arcane worlds of philosophy and theology. Former theology professor Joseph Ratzinger only mentioned Islam in passing in the lecture, which surveyed thousands of years of western thought and set out Benedict's views on rationalism in a debate that has been roiling Christianity for the past two centuries.

The pope quoted from both Byzantine emperor Manuel II and verses from the Koran as he explored the history of rationalism, and his audience understood this not as an insult to Islam, but rather as criticism of prevailing western views about liberty and reason.

Benedict's thesis about the relationship between faith and reason has its foundation in ancient Greek philosophy.

However, a sizeable number of Catholic and Protestant theologians argue that this so-called neo-Platonic perspective is inadequate for 21st century theology.

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Regarding your vocation as political leaders, Benedict writes: “The just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics� (no. 28a). He quotes St. Augustine, who suggests that “a state which is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves� (no. 28a). That’s pretty harsh language.

He goes on to say, “Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature has to do with ethics� (no. 28a).

Pope Benedict is not naïve about the challenges faced by politicians. He acknowledges that achieving a just world requires asking: “What is justice?� Answering this question correctly is difficult because, in his words, our human reason is “never … completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests� (no. 28a). Here in the midst of political polarization and interest-group paralysis we know these dangers are not empty abstractions or distant fears.

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“There exists a real sense of duplicity with Casey speaking at a Catholic institution while accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from radical left wing groups that attack the Church. Moreover, given Casey’s support of homosexual adoption, Plan B abortion drugs, and homosexual civil unions, it seems wholly inappropriate for him to deliver a lecture entitled ‘Restoring America’s Moral Compass,’� said Cella.

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Fidelis President Joseph Cella stated: “Bob Casey is shamelessly using the Catholic University of America to promote his campaign.�

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I bet this will be very interesting!

A group of prominent European Roman Catholics have been given the task of drafting a report on the common values of the EU countries.

The project was planned by the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community, the EU Observer reported.

The European Union plans to issue a statement on common values on its 50th anniversary on March 25, 2007. The Catholic bishops hope to influence that process.

One controversial question is whether a constitution for the European Union should make reference to God or to Europe's Christian heritage. The constitution rejected by voters in France and The Netherlands last year included no reference to religion.

Philippe de Schoutheete, a member of the task force and former Belgian ambassador to the European Union, said that citizens of member countries tend to forget that the union is not just about economic policy.

"The EU process has clearly been based on a certain number of values, but in the course of the process they have been largely forgotten," he said.

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On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free.

The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone.

"As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing."

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