Jeanie Hannaman

"La Verita” interview with Professor Roberto de Mattei - You invited German Catholics to stop paying the Kirchenstauer, namely, the Church tax, didn’t you?... de Mattei, “Yes, I did. It is an obligatory ecclesiastical tax between 8 and 10% of [one’s]income. This is very grave. In my opinion it is spiritual blackmail, since those who don’t pay are de facto excommunicated.”… “In Germany the State asks you if you are Catholic and if so, the levy is automatically taken and transferred to the Church. Those who don’t pay cannot baptize their children or have the funeral of a relative in church. It is an act of simony; the payment of an ecclesiastical tax cannot be the criteria for the adhesion or the abandonment of the Catholic faith. Heretics, if they pay the tax remain inside the Church. If Orthodox Catholics don’t pay it, they are expelled.”

By James T. Majewski, Catholic Culture - In honor of his feast day today, we’re featuring, for the first time on this podcast, St. Thomas Aquinas. Known as the “Angelic Doctor”, St. Thomas Aquinas is, arguably, the most influential theologian and philosopher that the Church has ever seen… St. Thomas lived well past the time of the Church Fathers, but his magnum opus, The Summa Theologica, is greatly indebted to the Fathers. Along with the Bible and the works of Aristotle, the Church Fathers are cited by him throughout the Summa as among the most authoritative sources.

By Bradley Eli, M.Div., Ma.Th., Church Militant - Football's New Orleans Saints and the archdiocese of New Orleans are fighting to keep private e-mails between them which discuss how to downplay the publication of a list of archdiocesan clergy accused of sex abuse… Attorneys for roughly two dozen men, alleged victims of sex abuse at the hands of archdiocesan clerics, have filed suit against the Saints to publicize e-mails contained in 276 documents, according to media reports on Friday… "Obviously, the Saints should not be in the business of assisting the archdiocese, and the Saints' public relations team is not in the business of managing the public relations of criminals engaged in pedophilia," read the attorneys' court filing....