Jeanie Hannaman

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture - As Condon reports, Father Franco Decaminada—the priest with the investments in African oil exploration—has now been imprisoned and laicized. But notice that he “had a reputation” for carrying shoeboxes full of cash—which means that his neighbors and colleagues noticed that habit. Anyone who saw the shoeboxes—to say nothing of anyone who was asked to invest tens of millions of dollars—should have known that something was terribly wrong. But the scheming continued for months, and in their ham-handed attempts to cover up their misdeeds, Vatican officials committed even more outrageous blunders.

By John P. McCarthy, Crisis Magazine - Ireland, particularly its government, is now in the strange position of being simultaneously hostile and indifferent to Catholicism… An indication of the seemingly indifferent attitude toward the Catholic Church by Irish officialdom occurred in connection with the recent canonization of John Henry Cardinal Newman. Newman was the founding rector (or president) of University College Dublin. Yet the University had not initially planned to send a representative to Rome for his October 10th canonization, nor had the Irish government.

By Joseph Pronechen, EWTN News - With death and judgment leading the list, Sheen sets the scene, noting how Our Lord gave us the Eucharist, his flesh and blood, which implies the resurrection of the body. First, we face the Four Last Things… The route begins early. “A happy death is a masterpiece, and no masterpiece was ever perfected in a day,” Sheen said. People fear death chiefly because they “are not prepared for it.” On the other hand, “Death is a beautiful thing for him who dies before he dies, by dying daily to the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil.”