BENEDICT TO THE RESCUE

In a week where California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed a hyper-leftwing pro-abortion lesbian “married” to her “partner” as his chief of staff, and South Africa’s Constitutional Court ordered Parliament to legalize homosexual “marriage,” the moral sanity exhibited by the Catholic Church was a welcome relief.

On Wednesday, November 29, the Vatican issued an Instruction entitled, Concerning the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders, which now has the authority of canon law.

It reiterates that homosexual acts are “grave sins… intrinsically immoral and contrary to natural law.” (more…)

Chapter Sixteen: XICOTENCATL – YOUNG AND OLD

Chapter Sixteen: Xicotencatl – Young and Old

Malinali was stunned that Cortez was speaking this way to the Tlaxcalan elders. She knew how close the Spaniards were to giving up, how they feared another attack. But… but… the Tlaxcalans did not know this. They must have believed what she told the prisoners she had set free! Yet how did Cortez learn of this? She had not told him what she had done. It must be that Cortez was a genio with people as Bernal said.

For Cortez’s words had the desired effect on the Tlaxcalan chiefs. They bowed deeply, swore (more…)

COOLING ON CONDI

For some time now, I’ve been telling you that Condi Rice may replace Dick Cheney (who would step down for “health reasons”) as Bush’s Vice-President, putting her in the catbird seat for the GOP presidential nomination in ’08. I expect this to take place by summer 2006.

As I discussed last month in 44, her candidacy would be do more damage to the Democrat Party than Katrina did to the Gulf Coast. She is the only candidate the GOP can put up who could defeat Hillary.

(Try this on as a barf alert: John McCain as Hillary’s running mate. (more…)

THE DEMISE OF FRANCE

After two weeks of unrestrained violence across the country, France imposed curfews and a state-of-emergency rule on 24 of its provinces. The government certainly hopes that this wartime measure will quickly scale down the riots and it may well do that.

Yet history is more likely to look back on this not as the end of an irrational burst of urban violence, but as the first act in a protracted time of troubles for France and Europe that could ultimately lead to the demise of European civilization as we know it.

None of this is even remotely discernible in French (more…)