Jeanie Hannaman

By David Warren, The Catholic Thing - For many years, according at least to the U.S. State Department and other Western diplomatic agencies, the “Palestinians” were wishing for a separate state. This is the “two-state” solution to the “Israeli” problem, said to be otherwise intractable... Most Americans, and probably most Catholics, have been willing to concede this as a diplomatic fix; it gives us something glib to say. Most Israelis are, also, willing to be glib. They offer, or used to offer, “land for peace.” This never worked for them.

By Tim Sullivan, Associated Press - It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening... Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe... So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned... At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.

By Peter M.J. Stravinskas, Catholic World Report - Most of the bishops went into that Council as Arians; it was the indefatigable persistence of Athanasius that changed the course of events... Our saint of the day, Athanasius of Alexandria, was probably born in that city between 296 and 298 A.D... It was in that city that, centuries earlier, Jewish scholars rendered the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, giving us the Septuagint text, used by all the authors of the New Testament. Athanasius had a stellar education, fluent in both Greek and Coptic—although he admits ignorance of Hebrew.

By Matthew Balan, CNA - The proposal is to shrink the city’s parishes from 61 parishes to 26 parishes... Hundreds of Catholic residents of Baltimore packed the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen on Tuesday evening to give their often-impassioned reactions to a process that could lead to the closure of two-thirds of the city’s parishes. ...