Marriage

By Kate Quiñones for CNA – HHS stated Wednesday that “there are only two sexes, female and male,” defining sex as “unchangeable and determined by objective biology.”… The announcement comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168, which affirms the biological reality of sex, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation last week as secretary of the HHS… “There are only two sexes, female and male, because there are only two types of gametes… An individual human is either female or male based on whether the person is of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova) or sperm.”

By Alyssa Murphy, National Catholic Register – It was just a couple of weeks ago that the news broke: Ryan Anderson’s bestselling book When Harry Became Sally was back on the virtual shelves of Amazon’s online bookstore. As Catholics and conservatives applauded the news, it was a call and answer that occurred on the Twittersphere, or the X-sphere, Anderson pointed out… In recounting the tale to EWTN News, Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that he found the decision “transparently political,” and he says despite the executive orders and the tide turning for those who believe in common sense, people’s guard should not come down on such issues.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – On January 22, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, issued a pastoral letter called “The Christian Family, In Vitro Fertilization and Heroic Witness to True Love.” In his letter, Bishop Burbidge seeks to guide people of good will and the faithful to better understand the respect that is owed to the human person by addressing the inherent dangers and immorality of in vitro fertilization (IVF) and the perennial teaching of the Catholic Church regarding marriage, procreation, and family life.

By Lois McLatchie Miller, First Things – Elon Musk did the world a service by bringing the U.K.’s darkest crimes to light. The “grooming gangs” scandal, which took place over decades in our poorest, post-industrial towns, should never be forgotten, especially since many perpetrators still have not been brought to justice. Various authorities failed to investigate the crimes out of fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic, a symptom of Britain’s performative commitment to diversity and multiculturalism. Unchecked immigration was almost certainly a contributing factor, as was rampant poverty.

By Susan Ciancio, Catholic World Report – The Culture of Life Studies Program from the American Life League helps build a foundation of faith that every family needs as they walk the path to eternity with God… February is the Month of the Holy Family—a time to reflect upon the three people we can seek solace from in times of turmoil and share joy with in times of happiness. They are the ones we should strive to emulate, especially as we work to make our families holy and bring each member closer to God.

By Tristan Justice and Gina Bontempo, The Federalist – The confirmation of America’s new Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., offers a generational opportunity to reinvigorate the nation’s health before the twin epidemics of obesity and chronic disease become endemic.. “If I’m given the chance to fix the chronic disease crisis and reform our food production, I promise that within two years we will watch the chronic disease burden lift dramatically,” Kennedy said in his Phoenix endorsement speech of then-Republican nominee Donald Trump. “We will make Americans healthy again.”

By Todd Aglialoro, Catholic Answers – This has been National Marriage Week, and of course (Feb. 14th) is St. Valentine’s. A double reason, then, to honor one of the primordial forces of human nature: the inner drive of man and woman to seek out and cling to one another in a permanent, exclusive embrace, for their mutual aid and the bearing and raising of children… This force, however, once as constant as gravity and as powerful as the sun, seems to be… slipping.

By Jennifer Roback Morse, National Catholic Register – USAID has been systematically exporting the sexual revolution to countries that do not want it… The recent freeze on U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) expenditures has brought attention to that agency’s unaccountability and waste. But the problems with USAID run deeper than merely wasting taxpayer dollars or being opaque about its activities… Despite funding some worthwhile recipients, USAID has been systematically exporting the sexual revolution to countries that do not want it. Contrary to popular opinion, the sexual revolution is not the result of spontaneous cultural movements or impersonal historical forces.

By James Lalino, Daily Signal – “When you say that name [Rodney Glasgow], it’s like the emotions of wanting to just cry. I get chills. That name and what he did to our community was just unimaginable,” said a parent of a current Kentucky Country Day School student, granted anonymity due to the risk of their children being expelled from the elite independent school that costs a maximum of $30,200 per year… Glasgow runs The Glasgow Group.. is a Maryland-based for-profit educational consultant company that specializes in diversity, equity, and inclusion training for teachers and school administrators.

By Douglas Andrews, Patriot Post – Those crafty Communist Chinese haven’t fought a land war in nearly half a century, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t actively engaged in warfare… It’s just that the conventional kind is so unappealing to the ChiComs. As the great and ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu stressed, the real Art of War is to defeat one’s enemy without even fighting him. This is why, as author Peter Schweizer writes in Blood Money, every Chinese officer, soldier, and sailor has since 2006 been required to study Sun Tzu’s classic tract.

By Susan Berry, Ph.D., CatholicVote – Several major children’s hospitals in the United States have stopped giving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and trans-related surgeries to minors in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order that threatens to withhold federal funding from institutions that continue the harmful treatments and procedures… On Jan. 28, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” in which he affirmed: “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.

By The Catholic Herald – The American bishops have applauded an executive order that seeks to prohibit biological men from competing in women’s sports… “We welcome the President’s EO that protects opportunities for women and girls to compete in sports safely and fairly,” Bsps. Robert Barron and David M. O’Connell… Bishops Barron and O’Connell are the chairmen of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committees on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth; and Catholic Education, respectively.

By Steven Ertel, LifeNews – The liberal media and abortion activists claimed that banning abortions would kill women… Women won’t get health care, they will be turned away when they have a miscarriage, and abortion bans will ultimately kill women. Those where the lies the pro-abortion left told people over and over again about what would happen if states ban abortions after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe. V Wade… Today, the CDC proved those claims totally false.

By Carl R. Trueman, First Things – The last decade witnessed a sharp turn against the so-called purity culture that emerged in the 1990s American Christian scene. Emphasizing abstinence and exalting virginity, it has since been blamed for promoting unhealthy views of sex and for damaging some of its adherents. Indeed, mockery of purity culture has become a standard trope, even within Christian circles, where it is often decried for causing trauma, that most elastic term in the dictionary of modern victimhood.

By Tyler Arnold, CNA – The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) banned biological men from competing in women’s sports on Thursday, Feb. 6, to comply with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump the previous day… A new NCAA policy that went into effect on Thursday afternoon states that biological men are no longer eligible to compete on women’s college athletic teams under any circumstance. The NCAA is the largest college athletic association and governs the athletic policies for the highest levels of college sports.

By Doug Mainwaring, LifeSiteNews – President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning men, including those who “identify” as female, from participating in women’s sports in order to “protect opportunities for women and girls to compete in safe and fair sports.”  … “The war on women’s sports is over,” declared the president to the delight of the crowd… The scene in the White House East Room on Wednesday, where the president was flanked by dozens of women and girl athletes who had been waiting for this moment ….

Dr. Sean M. Salai, D.Min, Catholic World Report – Americans have grown more worried about their pocketbooks and less concerned about the culture wars over the past decade, an annual family values survey has found… Deseret News reported Thursday that 71% of adults responding to a poll last year flagged “economic challenges” while fewer than half cited hot-button social topics as major issues facing the nation… That reflects a gradual flip-flop in 10 questionnaires dating back to 2015

By Moira Gleason, Daily Signal – Two conservative women’s groups urged the Senate to enact into law protections for women’s sports as President Donald Trump signed an executive order barring men from women’s sports Wednesday… “The war on women’s sports is over. Should have been done long ago,” Trump told a room packed with female athletes, government officials, and supporters… The order, titled “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports,” directs federal agencies to ensure entities that receive federal funding interpret federal Title IX law according to biological sex, not the sex someone chooses to “identify” as.

By Bishop Joseph Strickland, LifeSiteNews staff – On this week’s episode of A Shepherd’s Voice, Bishop Joseph Strickland explores the Fourth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother,” emphasizing its critical role in strengthening families and society… Strickland discusses how honoring parents is not only a duty to family but also a reflection of divine order, highlighting the importance of proper respect, discipline, and gratitude within the family unit. He underscores that the breakdown of the family structure is at the root of many societal issues today and calls for a return to God’s plan for family life.

By Jules Gomes, The Stream – Research vindicates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who faced robust questioning from senators at confirmation hearings… Vaccinated children are 170% more likely to suffer from autism and have a 212% higher risk of developing neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as bacterial infections and allergies, according to a groundbreaking peer-reviewed study… Published in the Science, Public Health Policy and the Law journal on January 23, the study analyzed the data of 47,155 children in the Florida’s Medicaid program from birth to age 9 and concluded that increasing numbers of vaccinations are associated with an increased risk of autism.

By Theresa Farnan, Eric Kniffin, Mary Rice Hasson, First Things – Trump’s ban on gender transitioning has turned the tide on an indefensible cult,” writes Telegraph columnist Suzanne Moore. “The pretense that sex can be changed is over.” In just ten days, President Trump has worked a stunning reversal of ten years of federal policy. From the Obama years to the Biden era, progressives sought to “eradicate the biological reality of sex” and replace it with “an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity.” They largely succeeded.

By Moira Gleason, Daily Signal – Homeschool families in Virginia celebrated a victory Thursday after the Virginia state Senate backed away from a bill that threatened religious exemptions for homeschoolers… SB 1031 sought to get rid of an exemption that permits families in the state to homeschool their children because of their religious convictions. After initially voting to pass the bill, the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee acted on a motion to reconsider and voted 13-2 to pass by indefinitely on the bill, meaning the bill will not go to the Senate floor unless the committee takes the bill up again.

By Dawn Beutner, Catholic World Report – The 19th Italian saint had a magnetic effect on children and adults because he possessed an abundance of profound, Christlike joy… The tragedy of boys failing to grow into good men is not a modern phenomenon. While there are many reasons that young men today drift through life or engage in dangerous behaviors, this is not a new problem… In the twenty-first century, this probably has much to do with boys lacking father figures in their lives because of the Sexual Revolution. In 19th century Italy, another revolution was at least partly to blame: the Industrial Revolution.

By Justine Brooke Murray, MRC TV – How scary to think that up until now, civilized society allowed pseudo-doctors to chemically castrate and sexually mutilate children in the name of a cult-like ideology… It’s a barbaric practice widely condemned by the West when it’s carried out by the backward societies of the Middle East that remain stuck in the 7th century. But when our own children become the victims of that same barbarism, our virtue-signaling pop culture has not only normalized but encouraged the act in the name of “gender affirming care.”

By Angela Lill, Crisis Magazine – In all this talk about women’s role in the Church, a more vital and visible female role for the future of the Church has been drastically overlooked—that of the mother… The close of the synod a few months ago created a media buzz around the discussion of increasing women’s ministerial roles within the Church hierarchy, including ordination to the diaconate. There was a worldly clamor for “inclusiveness” and to “enlarge the spiritual motherhood” of women.

By Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, The Daily Signal – President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday preventing the federal government from funding or supporting irreversible transgender medical interventions for minors… “Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions,” the order says. “This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.

By David G Bonagura, Jr., The Catholic Thing – “Excellence,” along with its cousin “success,” is the most overused word in education. It adorns mission statements and admission pitches at all levels of both Catholic and secular schools, seeking to convince prospective students to enroll and prospective donors to give. The Catholic elementary school where I was educated, to name but one, had a citation on its outdoor sign: “A National School of Excellence.” The honor was bestowed by some accrediting agency that somehow wielded the majestic power to define what is excellent.

By Jeff Minick, Chronicles – Among the books in my collection is Judith Martin’s Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, in which the author addresses “lapses in civility.” I dip into this hefty volume from time to time, less for edification than for the pleasure of her tart observations… In the last three years, several female writers—wives and mothers for the most part—have also sought to rescue civilization, not just from social gaffes but from the radical ideologies infecting our culture and threatening the ruin of marriage and the family…

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture –
A few days ago, I reviewed Eduard Habsburg’s guide to successful married life (The Habsburgs on marriage and family). Today I offer ten rules drawn from my own experience and reflection. It’s not rocket science; not everybody needs to read a book to figure it out. But it does take thought, prayer and self-discipline to turn all of the points below into the strong habits that create good marriages. I divide my rules into two groups of five, each with its own heading ….

By Craig Bannister, MRC TV – As President Donald Trump begins has second term in the White House, Americans are voicing their opposition to the transgender policies and initiatives advanced by the Biden Administration, results of a New York Times/Ipsos poll released over the weekend reveal… More than three-fourths (77%) of U.S. adults say that society has at least far enough to accommodate transgender people, including half (49%) who think it’s gone “too far.” Notably, even 62% of Democrat Americans believe the nation has gone either far enough (39%) or too far (23%).

CatholicVote – The Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., delivered a stridently political sermon about “transgender children” and illegal immigrants in the presence of President Donald Trump during a traditional national prayer service held at the Washington National Cathedral Tuesday. Trump later characterized the sermon as “ungracious” and called on the bishop to apologize to the public… On the first full day of Trump’s second term, Episcopal Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde presided over the Service of Prayer for the Nation. Trump attended the service with his wife Melania, other family members, Vice President Vance, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-LA.

By Craig Bannister, MRC TV – In his inaugural address on Monday, President Donald Trump announced that, under his administration, the U.S. government will abandon social engineering and recognize the existence of only two genders: those dictated by biology… After promising to put an end to the previous administration’s weaponization of government and political persecutions, the newly-inaugurated president said the federal government will now stop imposing gender ideology on Americans: “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” …

By Timothy Goeglein, Daily Signal – Why are so many Americans waiting so long to get married?… One-third of young adults will likely never marry, according to recent research. Lyman Stone, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, analyzed the data and came to some important conclusions… The Knot, a wedding website, ran a study finding that the average age of men and women getting married is now 32 and 30 respectively. The Pew Research Center found that 25 percent of adults over the age of 40 have never been married.

CatholicVote – A federal district court Thursday morning threw out the outgoing Biden administration’s pro-LGBTQ rewrite of Title IX, which critics say undermined women’s and girls’ sports. The ruling applies to the entire country… The U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Kentucky’s decision in the case Tennessee v. Cardona states that the administration’s “Final Rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the Department’s authority under Title IX.”

By Jack Rigert, Catholic Exchange – In the Theology of the Body John Paull II wrote, The human body, with its sex—its masculinity and femininity—seen in the very mystery of creation, is not only a source of fruitfulness and of procreation, as in the whole natural order, but contains “from the beginning” the “spousal” attribute, that is, the power to express love: precisely that love in which the human person becomes a gift—and through this gift—fulfills the very meaning of his being and existence. (JPII, Man and Woman, He Created Them, No. 15.1)

By The Stream – Despite being only 27 years old, Mason has a story to tell that is unlike most you will ever hear — and full of truth. In this 90-minute video, he shares his testimony of growing up in a religious Christian home, experiencing early childhood trauma, and his journey into — and later, out of — drugs, promiscuity, and the occult… But it took a near-death experience for him to come out of all those things… This fascinating video is an expose of the methods of the enemy and the power and grace of God. ….

By Steven Thomas, Crisis Magazine – Expecting to make America great without strong families is like racing your 800-horsepower Ferrari 812 Superfast in reverse… You can put focus on manufacturing, education, and politics all you want, but the most, and I mean the most essential thing that is needed to make America great is the restoration of the traditional family. As the family goes, so goes…well, really everything.

By CatholicVote News Feed – Homeschooling and private education are among the only long-term answers parents have to the increasing influence of DEI policies in public schools, according to Sheri Few, founder and president of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE)… “Despite corporations and other institutions abandoning ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI), divisive policies are still being promoted by the U.S. Department of Education under the Biden administration,” said Few in a statement via email. …

CV News Feed – According to the results of a recent investigation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the outgoing Biden administration poured over $100 million into pushing far-left causes such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in schools across much of the country… The Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan reported on Thursday that over the four years President Joe Biden has been in office, his DOJ “awarded over $100,113,942” to the various “woke” initiatives “through 102 grants, throughout 36 states, impacting 946 school districts and upwards of 3 million K-12 students.”

By Ashley Bateman, The Federalist – Pakaluk opens with the story of Hannah, a woman from a Reformed Jewish background whose search for meaning led her ultimately to procreation and the proliferation of family through child-bearing, what she called “this key to infinity.” At the time of her interview, Hannah had seven children, and described her choice to have a large family as a “deliberate rejection of an autonomous, customized, self-regarding lifestyle in favor of a way of life intentionally limited by the demands of motherhood.”

By Justine Brooke Murray, MRC TV – “There are only 2 genders, male and female,” announced President-elect Donald Trump at Turning Point USA’s America Fest on Sunday… No kidding. But our society has fallen to the point where proclaiming it is a stunning revelation. That is why Trump introduced his plan to make basic biology the official policy of the United States.

By Stephen Kokx, LifeSiteNew – Donald Trump is doubling down on his intention to study a possible link between vaccines and autism in children… During a free-flowing press conference at Mar-a-Lago Monday, the incoming president said there are “problems” with the massive increase in autism cases in America over the past several decades and that he intends to get to the bottom of it… “30 years ago, we had, I’ve heard numbers like 1 in 200,000, 1 in 100,000. Now I’m hearing numbers like 1 in 100.

By Mark Alexander, Publisher, Patriot Post – Here, then, is Virginia’s question and Mr. Church’s response transcribed from the New York Sun’s original text… According to The Sun editors: “We take pleasure in answering at once and thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the readers of the Sun.”… “Dear Editor: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in the Sun it’s so.’ Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus? Virginia O’Hanlon, 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.”… And Church’s response:

By Craig Bannister, MRC TV – Audio clips of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito dissecting and disproving arguments against a Tennessee law banning transgender medical treatments on minors went viral after the SCOTUS justices heard oral arguments in U.S. v. Skrmetti (SB1)… At Wednesday’s hearing, Biden Administration Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio presented arguments on behalf of the plaintiffs… Their lawsuit asks (SCOTUS) to either strike down Tennessee’s law banning transgender medical procedures, such as hormones and puberty blockers, on minors or at least send it back down to a lower court for further scrutiny.

By Regis Martin, Crisis Magazine – … if we are to take seriously the injunction Jesus gives us in Matthew 18:3: “I assure you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.” This is not an invitation for the adults in the room to set about infantilizing themselves, but to become rather like little children themselves. And how do they do that? By keeping their eyes wide open. “Reason is like an eye,” explains Luigi Giussani in his signature work, The Religious Sense, “staring at reality, greedily taking it in, recording its connections and implications, penetrating reality, moving from one thing to another yet conserving all of them in memory, trying to embrace everything.”

By Joy Pullmann, The Federalist – Americans who spent at least three high school years homeschooling or attending a Protestant Christian school are much more likely than public school graduates to express Christian beliefs and attend church as adults, finds a recently released survey. Those surveyed who spent at least three years in a Roman Catholic high school are about as likely to attend church and read the Bible as Americans who attended public schools.

By Judy Roberts, National Catholic Register – Amid the presidential campaign, the political football of illegal immigration figured prominently, but the children at the center of it were rarely mentioned… For all the talk about illegal immigration during the recent presidential campaign, one aspect that got little attention was the plight of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children said to have disappeared since crossing the border… Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, did raise the issue during October’s vice-presidential debate when he claimed the Department of Homeland Security had effectively lost 320,000 migrant children.

By Nate Jackson, Patriot Post – I can also tell you that true gender affirmation means affirming someone’s birth sex. Like George Orwell’s newspeak in 1984, the Left has turned this on its head. When a leftist says “gender affirmation,” he means a futile attempt to reverse God’s created order — to change, not affirm, gender, often through scientific and medical experimentation… Don’t ever call what the Left wants “gender-affirming care.” That is a lie.

By Joannie Watson, Integrated Catholic Life – People think I’m a Scrooge… My sister and I lament each year to each other that people are decorating for Christmas earlier and earlier. When I was growing up, decorating the day after Thanksgiving was considered early, and now it’s the norm, even among Catholics. Those of us who wait until even mid-December are the odd balls… And I look like a Scrooge. I don’t play Christmas music until at least after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. We don’t put our tree until Gaudete Sunday.

By Joy Pullmann, The Federalist – Earlier efforts like these created some robust institutions. Pre-law students at Patrick Henry College, a Christian college founded in 2001, outscore Ivy Leaguers on the LSAT. In 1994, New Saint Andrews College opened with four students in Moscow, Idaho. It now has 220 students and 27 faculty. After opening in 2007 with 35 students, Wyoming Catholic College “has grown 30 percent in the last decade, from 124 to 178 students.” In 1971, Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell started Liberty University. It is now one of the world’s largest Christian universities, with 15,000 students on campus and 80,000 online.

By Jordan Boyd, The Federalist – Whether it is politically, scientifically, or artistically advantageous or not to acknowledge, IVF’s roots lie in accommodating the desires of adults without regard for the commodification of children. Purdy, Edwards, and Steptoe’s scientific development may have paved the way for millions of pregnancies and births, but it has also opened the door for horrors like switching embryos at birth, designer babies, motherless and fatherless children, the erasure of women’s vital role in reproduction, and fraud.

By Calvin Freiburger, LifeSiteNews – Walmart, America’s largest employer, says it will remove sexualized and transgender products targeted at children, review all funding of LGBT ‘pride’ initiatives, end ‘racial equity training,’ and stop participating in the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, among other victories for conservatives… The campaign to “de-woke” corporate America has claimed its biggest win yet, with the news that retail giant Walmart is abandoning a broad range of “diversity” initiatives it had previously invested heavily in.

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – The transgender industry pretends to be concerned about resolving the mental distress of people with gender identity disorder. In fact, it’s a psychiatric and medical scam, detransitioner Walt Heyer tells Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse… Back in 1981, Heyer’s doctor lobbied to get gender dysphoria into the psychiatric reference guide, the DSM — not because it would help the patients, but because it would make it easier to sell wrong-sex hormones and genital surgeries. …

By Theresa Civantos Barber, Aleteia – Christians are called to reject consumerism and embrace simplicity, but what does this actually look like?… When you look at homes on Instagram or Pinterest, you’ll see lots of pictures of gleaming floors and pristine countertops. But those homes are not exactly the norm. Most of us have a harder time keeping our homes not only tidy but free of clutter… The environment around us greatly affects how we think and feel. Messy homes have been found to make us feel anxious, helpless, and overwhelmed. …

By Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things – America is missing children because it’s missing marriages. However, fixing our fertility gap won’t happen by pressuring or humiliating singles. It requires fixing the broken dating cultures that are delaying marriage formation and leaving men and women feeling resentful of each other. The vast majority of young adults want to get married, but more and more find it isn’t working out as they expect. As a result, half of America’s drop in fertility is explained by the drop in marriage formation.

By Thomas Gallatin, Patriot Post – That wealthy, leftist, hate-promoting outfit known as the Southern Poverty Law Center has once again shown itself to be guilty of the very bigoted hatred it supposedly exists to expose and oppose… The SPLC has published an article about The Babylon Bee, the satirical website that has a straight-news sibling site called Not the Bee. In that piece, the SPLC revealed the identities and locations of six of the writers for the Bee who write under pseudonyms.

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing – What my age cohort did with that culture is another matter.  We now have a nation where a female Supreme Court justice is unable or unwilling to define what a woman is… We’re now a very long way from the (relative) innocence of the 1960s.  Which is why a tool like The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters is so valuable.  We live in a moment of intense cultural confusion and relentless noise.  For exactly that reason, the Playbook primarily targets young, college-aged adults, though it makes essential reading for parents as well.

By John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist – This shouldn’t be hard or need any clarification. Rep. McBride is a man, and Johnson should have said so plainly… House Speaker Mike Johnson failed to answer a very easy question lobbed at him Tuesday morning. He was asked whether Rep. Sarah McBride, an incoming freshman lawmaker from Delaware who identifies as transgender, is a man or a woman. McBride is a man who presents as a woman, so Johnson’s answer should have been easy: McBride is a man.

By Matija Štahan, Crisis Magazine – With the first successful implementation of Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface, Neuralink, at the beginning of the year, perhaps we will one day consider that the era of transhumanism was officially begun in 2024. What is transhumanism, though? It is a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to science. It’s not just an ideology either. Nor is it a philosophy or even (only) a hidden secular religion. Transhumanism is all that and more—it is the spirit that pervades numerous phenomena of our time. As I will try to demonstrate, that spirit is anti-Christian.

By Carrie Gress, American Spectator – There are easy steps we can take to start righting the women’s vote now so future elections don’t hinge on the unhinged…. Kamala Harris campaigned like she was running for the presidency of Planned Parenthood, not the United States, with abortion central to her campaign. She promoted a draconian future should Donald Trump be reelected. And it worked. At least for a large demographic of white, educated, single women. …

By Susan Klemond, National Catholic Register – During both of her unintended pregnancies, abortion initially had seemed like the obvious choice, White said… “It almost felt like that was what had been taught to us, and I can’t tell you where that had been taught to me,” she said. “It just seemed like that was the norm, like I’m young and I’m pregnant, so I should get an abortion.”

By Peter Martin, LifeSiteNews – This weekend, dioceses across the country will be taking up the United States Conference for Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) annual collection for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), the USCCB’s scandal-ridden charity arm… For years, the CCHD has given millions of dollars to groups that openly reject Catholic teaching and promote abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, contraception, and other grave evils in contradiction to the CCHD’s own stated policy.

By Matthew McDonald, National Catholic Register – Database Released In October Found That About 150 Catholic Hospitals Assisted Minors In Gender Transitioning During a Five-Year Period… Bishops should discuss and act on a recent report that Catholic hospitals have provided “pediatric sex-change services” for patients 17 and younger, two bishops told EWTN News recently… Their comments come as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops holds its annual fall meeting in Baltimore, which began Monday.

By John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., Catholic World Report – What is most interesting to me, however, is the “4B reaction” of this death cult. For those noninitiates who never heard of this movement… it is apparently a five-something-year-old South Korean “feminist” ideological import. The four “Bs” are words in Korean: 1) no dating men, 2) no marrying men, 3) no having babies, 4) no sex with men…. What is happening, I maintain, comes from a deeper and darker place: a sacralization, an idolization of politics into a false religion, so that a political loss becomes an act of faith and the casus belli for a war of religion against one’s opponents.

By Bishop James D. Conley, The Catholic Thing – Before Christianity came on the scene, ancient Greek and Roman pagans did not consider children to be fully human persons like adults. Indeed, it is not too strong to say that Christianity introduced the concept of children that we have today, in which we give children more concern than adults owing to their vulnerability. This was truly a revolutionary concept… Such a view comes directly from the commands of Christ, whose very strong view was also extremely counter-cultural.

By Mike Schramm, Catholic Exchange – There has been some chatter online recently about a conversation between Rainn Wilson, famous for portraying Dwight Schrute on TV’s The Office, 58, and Trisha Paytas, YouTuber, vlogger, and influencer, 36, on Wilson’s podcast, Soul Boom. The conversation is less about the content itself discussed and more about the dynamic between Wilson and Paytas. I included the ages of both because many of the comments in response to this uproar centered around the generation gap between the two individuals. ….

By Dakota Meyer, The Stream – … only a small part of America’s legacy is based on who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s prominently dictated by the actions and decisions of hundreds of millions of people who build their own legacies one day at a time, regardless of their circumstances or who the president is… The Greatest Generation taught us this 80 years ago, when it defeated Germany and Japan… They could have given up any time, and I doubt we would have blamed them. Instead, they cemented their legacies one person at a time.

By Christine Yeargin, Patriot Post – When parents send their children away for seven hours a day to those who statistically despise their values, not only do they forfeit their role as the biggest influence in their child’s life, but they hand it directly to those who oppose them… Voddie Baucham said, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”..

By Paul Senz, Catholic World Report – “I had no idea,” says Kevin Wells, “the story I/we had intended to write of a self-emptying priest during the pandemic would actually become a memoir about marriage—and the manner in which matrimonial graces work to dissolve the dark night.”… Priests are indispensable in the life of the Church… We may not always recognize the profound role priests play in our lives, but in some cases, the role is so dramatic that it cannot be ignored.

By Janet E. Smith, Ph.D., Crisis Magazine – We are on the brink of the 2024 presidential election—which, perhaps more than ever, has us on the brink of preserving this wonderful nation or losing it… Is it true that some Catholics still don’t know for whom they are going to vote, or if they are going to vote? What more do they need to know than they know already? Maybe a lot… A good case can be made for not voting or voting for a third-party candidate in “non-swing” states, but I believe it imperative for Catholics to vote for Trump in swing states. Indeed, somewhat indirectly, Cardinal Burke makes a strong case for this perspective… The only hope we have for changing the laws on abortion (and saving this country!) is to elect those who will work to defend free speech and freedom of religion, who will deport illegal immigrants, who will ensure that elections are fair.

By Dr. Donald DeMarco, Catholic Exchange – In 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, in a Declaration of Sentiments, a group of feminists made the following statement: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having as direct object the establishment of absolute tyranny over her.”… Women decided to fight back. But their platform was defective. Their narrow view of history was a travesty of justice. …

By Kate Quiñones, CNA – The Biden administration announced on Monday that it will require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception in what the White House called the “most significant expansion … in more than a decade” of access to birth control under federal law… The new rule requires insurance companies to remove the prescription requirement for coverage of contraception. The administration seeks to expand contraception in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, according to a White House press conference.

By Kylee Griswold, The Federalist – Kamala Harris has done her best to make abortion the central issue for female voters this election. Of course, Democrats can’t even define “woman” (They aren’t biologists!), but they have no problem defining women’s issues as “reproductive freedom,” which is just lefty-speak for abortion at any time for any reason. Luckily for the Republican Party and the rest of the country, not all women are abortion-loving childless cat ladies — which was abundantly clear in both of Trump’s town halls on Wednesday.

By Matthew McDonald, National Catholic Register – The bishop of Spokane says it’s time for Church leaders to confront the role of Catholic hospitals in immoral procedures on minors… Reacting to a recent report that shows that scores of Catholic hospitals have provided children with drugs or surgeries to change their gender identity, a U.S. bishop has called for a special meeting of the country’s bishops to address what he sees as a major breach of Catholic medical ethics… “As bishops, I think we need to confront Catholic health care, because they are violating their mission,” Bishop Thomas Daly

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture – In a news release celebrating the meeting, New Ways Ministry identified the people who had spoken with the Pope along with Sister Gramick: two transgender individuals, the parents of another, and the co-director of a “gender medicine clinic.” If the Pope had any moral qualms about the choices they had made, or the operations they promote, his reservations were not recorded… Nor did the Vatican make any attempt to correct the record. The Vatican has been silent on the October 12 meeting. So once again New Ways Ministry has scored a major public-relations victory, with Pope Francis sitting by, smiling quietly.

By Jules Gomes, The Stream – Leading Catholic hospitals in the United States are performing transgender surgeries on minors, blatantly contradicting Catholic teaching from Rome and from the U.S. Bishops’ Doctrine Committee… A bombshell investigation conducted by Do No Harm, a secular organization that combats identity politics in medicine, has catalogued the cases of thousands of children subjected to irreversible sex-change interventions in U.S. hospitals between 2019 and 2023.

By Edmund Haislmaier, Joel White, The Daily Signal – Changes made to Medicare’s prescription drug coverage by the Biden-Harris administration and congressional Democrats—with not a single Republican vote—as part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act are sending premiums sky-high, eliminating plans for at least 3 million seniors, and making it harder to access medications… The data shows that under four years of Biden-Harris administration policies … the national average monthly premium paid by Medicare beneficiaries for stand-alone Part D prescription drug plans has increased by 57%.

By Jonathon Van Maren, LifeSiteNews – I have spoken to thousands of students on pornography in the last several years, and I can state unequivocally that not only is porn addiction a growing problem – porn addiction is starting at younger and younger ages… I have met porn addicts who started when they were five years old and had been hooked for a decade by the time they turned 15. I have met teens who were first exposed at ages 7, 8, or 9. I most frequently hear that porn addiction begins around Grade 6, with one school I recently spoke at having an issue with pornography in Grade 5. This problem is real, it is growing, and every community must recognize and respond to that fact.

By Charles J. Russo, Catholic World Report – On October 8, 2024, in a 4-3 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Scardina, the Supreme Court of Colorado may have finally ended the long-running ordeal of persecution by lawfare of Jack Phillips. The high-profile case began in the summer of 2012 after Phillips expressed his unwillingness to prepare a custom-made cake for individuals entering a same-sex “union” because doing so would have violated his Christian beliefs.

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing – Proponents of lax immigration policy, however, also employ population numbers. The American Chamber of Commerce has long pushed looser immigration with the claim that it will “boost economic growth” (and increase profits by paying lower wages), and that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t… This makes me want to ask: Is parenthood among the “jobs” immigrants will do that Americans won’t?

By Joy Pullmann, Ex. Editor, The Federalist – Contrary to propaganda messaging, our society is neither ‘overfeminized’ nor ‘pro-woman.’ It is deeply anti-woman… Since the 1960s, cultural leaders in media, Hollywood, academia, and politics have fiercely criticized men for expressing male characteristics, and have fiercely criticized women for expressing female characteristics. This has led some commentators on the right more recently to lambast what they call the “overfeminization” of society.

By Carrie Gress, Ph.D., National Catholic Register – Women were never intended to live in isolation or to live just for themselves. They are meant to be in relationships — thick relationships with husbands, children, God, extended family and spiritual children. The quicker we can get women to stop believing the lie that they were made to live for themselves or just a career, the quicker a pro-life culture can return. The best way to do this isn’t through long arguments or more academic papers, but by meeting women in familiar places. Convincing them need not be arduous. As one of my bosses used to like to remind me, honey attracts.

By Oliver Oliveros, Catholic Exchange – After reading Ryan Patrick Budd’s recent book, Salvation Stories: Family, Failure, and God’s Saving Work in Scripture, one is moved to ponder the effects of mankind’s rebellion against God’s commands. You’ll start to correlate the curses pronounced on Adam and Eve due to their disobedience with the interpersonal dysfunction we express from our adverse family relations… One of the curses on Eve affected her relationship dynamic with her husband, and the curse on Adam is related to his role as a provider (see Genesis 3:16-19).

By John M. Grondelski, Crisis Magazine – Our screen-based culture is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral. None of those characteristics is conducive to openness to transcendence… First Things editor Mark Bauerlein spoke September 12 at Belmont House, in Washington, D.C., about his latest book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, the sequel to his 2008 Dumbest Generation. Both books are about the consequences of letting a generation come of age on screens.

By Carrie Gress, Washington Examiner – On a personal level, all of this appears innocuous enough. Live and let live, right? But if one shifts the lens wider to a national scale, crises quickly emerge. The problems that most haunted us as a nation are all related to women’s fertility: abortion, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and even immigration. American women are not having enough children, so immigrants are required to fund government spending.

By Jonah McKeown, CNA – A new analysis by researchers at the Institute for Family Studies examines the states that are attracting and losing families, and finds that families are leaving many of the most progressive U.S. states and heading for states that are considered more conservative or politically diverse… Reliably blue states — i.e., states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both 2016 and 2020 — lost 213,000 families with children in 2021 and 2022, the researchers said… Meanwhile, states that voted Republican in both elections gained 181,000 families.

By Robert Marco, Catholic Exchange – Leila Marie Lawler: “I started writing because I saw a need for women experiencing ‘feminism-induced anxiety syndrome’ to get some relief. Feminism is an ideology that can only succeed by means of a great, unrelenting effort to overcome the natural tendency of a woman to wish to be home, to make a home, to be a helpmate to her husband, and to nurture her children… “One of the ways feminism keeps a stranglehold on women—not just their actions but their psyches—is by insisting that managing a home is difficult drudgery …..

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – A remarkable drama is unfolding in the United Kingdom over an issue of utmost urgency: the question of whether doctors should be able to prescribe powerful “puberty blocker” drugs to children suffering from gender dysphoria… According to news reports, the British Medical Association, the largest professional organization of doctors in the UK, is in an uproar. Numerous doctors have reportedly quit the union after its governing council voted to reject a government report calling for a ban on prescribing puberty blockers to children and teens.

By Eric Sammons, Crisis Magazine – … Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been unique in modern American history in a number of ways. For one, he has campaigned on issues that most politicians don’t touch, including our nation’s health and nutrition, his primary focus… While many pundits highlight his controversial stance on vaccines, his own emphasis has been the rise of chronic illness among Americans, particularly the young… he points a finger at what our nation eats. He argues that our dependence on processed foods and sugar and other harmful foods like seed oils has led to a health crisis of catastrophic proportions.

By Susan Berry, Ph.D., Catholic Vote – Americans who come from two-parent families and who belong to churches or other places of faith report that they have more people to rely on for help and support during times of crisis… The finding comes from the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) 2024 American Social Capital Survey, which focused on Americans’ social life. The survey examined the increasing isolation of Americans over the past half-century, observing that Americans “participate in organized activities less often and join fewer community groups than they once did.” …

By John-Michael Dumais, Children’s Health Defense – In a bold experiment that addresses the growing concerns about smartphone addiction and teen mental health, British journalist Decca Aitkenhead challenged her two teenage sons and eight of their friends to go without smartphones for a month… The results, published this month in the U.K.’s Sunday Times Magazine, offer a compelling glimpse into how digital detox can transform young lives — and potentially address what author Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., calls the “anxious generation.”

By Jason M. Craig, Crisis Magazine – “Marriage is a duel to the death,” said G.K. Chesterton, “which no man of honour should decline.” Marriage fully lived is, to borrow a form of battle uglier than dueling, mutual, assured destruction. But it doesn’t destroy persons and things, it destroys ego, pride, and selfishness. Oh, happy war that ends in both sides winning.

By Ray L. Flores II, Esq., Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense – Nine-month-old babies must receive multiple doses of an unlicensed mRNA COVID-19 vaccine to be considered “up to date” with their COVID-19 vaccination, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)… The CDC’s updated guidance, issued Aug. 30, states that children — as young as 6 months old — should get either two doses of the 2024-2025 Moderna vaccine or three doses of the 2024-2025 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

By Larry Chapp, National Catholic Register – Recently two Catholic apostolates to homosexuals both held important conferences promoting their respective organizations. Their starkly differing approaches raise the question of the proper relationship between the truth of doctrine and the mercy we need to show in our pastoral application of those truths… The first organization is the well-established ministry known as Courage International, founded in 1980 by Father John Harvey (1918-2010)… The second is Outreach, the relatively new ministry of Jesuit Father James Martin, which held a conference Aug. 2-4 at Georgetown University.

By Emma Waters, First Things – What began as a marriage recession has turned into a full-blown birth dearth. In 2023, the birthrate fell to its lowest point of 1.62 births per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The future of the US… is threatened by demographic decline. Our economy, Social Security, military readiness, eldercare, education, and more depend on new generations of children. On an individual level, this decline reflects a much darker reality… Pro-natalism, a movement against the decline in births, is making headlines as it draws prominent champions like Elon Musk. …

By Michael Hoffman, Crisis Magazine – Over the course of my relatively short career as an extraordinary proclaimer of the Word, my audience has responded with blank stares and occasional approving smiles. At least until this past Sunday, when I chose to read the longer version of the 2nd reading. St. Paul, who can sometimes be impenetrably obscure, is extremely and almost uncharacteristically blunt: “As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”

By Anna Davis, Crisis Magazine – From public streets, restaurants, and yes, our beloved Catholic parishes, nothing is sacred anymore. And this wholesale lack of respect starts—and in my opinion ends—with how we dress for our respective days… What’s the big deal? If you don’t like it, look away… If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed hardly anyone seems to be trying anymore… And we’re not talking ball gowns at the Met because in average settings that’s a bit nuts. We’re talking a baseline modicum of self-respect… Gone is the notion of “dressing for your day” as first heard by an ersatz employer in the not-too-distant past. What that even meant is still open for interpretation.

By Matt D’Antuono, National Catholic Register – As students return to college or go to college for the first time this fall, I would like to offer a few suggestions about how to stay Catholic in college. As it happens, I would suggest these same principles to anyone else as helpful practices for holding on to your faith… 1. Know your faith! … I grew up going to a Catholic Church, but hardly anything sank in. I was like a sitting duck for people to come and explain to me what was wrong with Catholicism. …

By Jack Rigert, Catholic Exchange – You on the other hand, are growing up in an unprecedented time in human history. A time when man has redefined marriage, demanded the right to kill their own children, and can no longer define what a woman is. All of this has shaken the very foundation of human civilization all over the world, and you, the most innocent and vulnerable, are experiencing the brunt of the resulting chaos. …

By Aliya Kuykendall, The Stream – Justice Kuehl… author of “Feminist to Feminine: Reclaiming the Value of Womanhood in God’s Story”… told The Stream about her conservative upbringing, how she became a passionate feminist, and then began to realize that the modern feminist movement wasn’t helping women or her own marriage… Along the way, she came across Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, which explain gender roles based on biological design. Those now inform her views of femininity. She encourages readers to find peace in biblical femininity and avoid either a fundamentalist or feminist ideology that reduces women to less than they actually are.

By Rachel Bovard, First Things – Conservatives lost the culture war decades ago, and as a result we are living not just under the political but also the corporate and cultural power of left-leaning CEOs, entertainment figures, and political leaders, many of whom do not have children, do not want them, and who adhere to an ideology that is either indifferent to or actively hostile toward traditional family life. Taken together with the well-documented phenomenon that Americans are having far fewer children, Vance’s statement becomes not just true, but prophetic. We are demographically destined to be governed by the childless.

By Jonathon Van Maren, LifeSiteNews – The public consensus has now changed. Even leftist politicians rarely debate that ubiquitous digital porn use has burned like acid through our collective sexual economy. The discussion is no longer “Is porn bad for our society?” but “How can we best deal with this problem?” Some, like vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance, have floated the idea of banning porn …

By Carrie Gress, The Catholic Thing – Resentment is a powerful thing. Marxist revolutionaries have fostered it in the heart of followers for over a century. Few are aware that envy and resentment are also at the heart of the feminist ideology. I’ve written previously about the power of the “Gospel of Discontent.” Most believe feminism was some kind of spontaneous cultural spark necessary to recognize the humanity of women, unaware of its highly effective grooming first by socialists, then communists, and finally the New Left.

By Michael Haynes, LifeSiteNews – Addressing participants of Father James Martin’s pro-LGBT “Outreach” conference, D.C.’s Cardinal Wilton Gregory said the heterodox event is aimed at “becoming a more inclusive family of faith.”… “In many respects you are engaging in an act of synodality – the vision and invitation proposed by Pope Francis that sincerely and openly speaking and listening to one another under the light and guidance of the Holy Spirit is the way that the Church grows in perfection,” said Gregory.

By Robert W. Patterson, The Federalist – When labor champion Theodore Roosevelt became president after William McKinley succumbed to an assassin’s bullets, establishment kingmakers such as Sen. Mark Hanna, R-Ohio, went into shock. Equally threatened when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the monied class suffered another coronary after the former president named Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, his running mate three weeks ago, sealing his commitment to remake the GOP into a working-class coalition. …

By Josh Hammer, Patriot Post – The elaborate ruse, intended to shield Democrats’ tongue-tied and dimwitted nominee-in-waiting from scrutiny during her extended post-coup rollout, has resurfaced this 2021 interview that Vance did with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “We’re effectively (running) in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”… Anyone who earnestly loves America must, by definition, care about making more American babies..

By James Jeffrey,  Catholic Herald – In a match to qualify for the quarter-finals of the women’s 66kg, the Italian female boxer Angela Carini lasted about 45 seconds in the ring against her Algerian opponent, Imane Khelif, a biological male, before she had to retire from the fight, unable to withstand the force of Khelif’s punches… Before those brief 45 seconds of the fight… Carini can be seen going through her pre-fight routine… She makes the sign of the cross, then genuflects on one knee, before getting up, turning around and going to meet her opponent.

By Mary Rice Hasson, Catholic World Report – In a recent interview psychologist Jordan Peterson asked Elon Musk why he is such an outspoken foe of so-called “gender-affirming care.” Musk countered that “gender-affirming care” is “a terrible euphemism…it’s really … child mutilation and sterilization.” “It’s very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender…and that they need to be the other gender…and that will solve their problems…Then they give them sterilizing drugs…called puberty blockers. Sterilizing drugs… so they can never have children…. It’s macabre. It’s evil.” Those were his words.

By Calvin Freiburger, LifeSiteNews – A team of conservative attorneys is making another attempt to force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider its 2015 decision to force same-sex “marriage” on the country, starting with a brief to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of former Rowan County, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis… After the Supreme Court’s controversial Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that forced all 50 states to recognize unions between members of the same sex as marriages, Davis declared that she would cease issuing marriage licenses, arguing that her required signature on the documents would constitute a personal endorsement of homosexual unions that violated her Christian beliefs.

By Brittany Hughes, LifeNews – Well this certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of civilization. Or, frankly, the benefit of humans in general… According to a new Pew study released this week, the percentage of adults under the age of 50 who say they probably won’t ever have kids has skyrocketed in recent years, jumping a whopping 10 points in the last half decade alone. In 2023, the share of adults ages 18 to 49 who say they’re now “unlikely to ever have kids” stood at a stunning 47 percent, up from 37 percent in 2018.

By Siobhan Heekin-Canedy, The Public Discourse – ,.. I hesitated to admit that when it comes to work and family, family comes first. I feared that acknowledging the priority of home and children would undermine my belief that women are needed in the public sphere… I had unconsciously absorbed our culture’s insistence that children and parenthood (particularly motherhood) are career obstacles to be overcome, rather than goods in themselves… with time and experience have I become aware of this cultural messaging and grown comfortable stating what I knew, deep down, all along: that children are more important than any job.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Our current society… is so influenced by an “eclipse of truth,” that practically every institution, whether implicitly or explicitly, teaches and reinforces a set of moral principles that are diametrically opposed to the Christian moral worldview… The words “sex education” can ring alarm bells in the minds of many Christian parents. And not without reason. Most of what passes for “sex education” is nothing more than sex miseducation. …

By Michael Toscano, First Thing – I was recently invited to lunch at an elite club in New York for work. When I made the mistake, unbeknownst to me, of pulling my dumb phone out of my pocket, I was promptly scolded by a doorman, who commanded me to “put it away.” “No phones allowed, sir,” he said. I couldn’t help but notice the relish with which he meted out the discipline, but my embarrassment soon passed. My envy, however, did not. This rarified stratum of American life had retained the power to stigmatize ill-mannered uses of tech. If only the rest of us had such freedom—if only it extended to the poor, working-class, and middle-class, too.

By Thomas Gallatin, Patriot Post – … the topic of transgenderism came up, specifically as it relates to children. Musk called gender-affirming care “a terrible euphemism,” instead labeling it “child mutilation and sterilization.”… “It’s evil,” he said. “You’re taking kids who are far below the age of consent.” He added, “It’s very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having an actual identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender.”… Musk responded: “Well, it happened to one of my older boys. I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier. This was really before I had any understanding of what was going on, and we had COVID going on, so there was a lot of confusion. And I was told Xavier might commit suicide.”

By Michael Haynes, LifeSite News – Father James Martin S.J.’s pro-LGBT group had its recent fundraiser hosted by two “married” homosexual men in a seemingly recurring event… In a social media post, the prolific LGBT advocate and Jesuit priest revealed details of the latest fundraiser for his pro-LGBT group, Outreach. “Thanks again to Brian Stevens and Alex Capecelatro for hosting a fundraising dinner for Outreach at their beautiful home in Provincetown, Mass,”

By E. Christian Brugger, EWTN News – The moral norms protecting the marriage bed are not “rules” created by the Church, but truths that we discover by attending to the natural law, which is inscribed on our hearts and has God as its author. It is important to understand that the Church does not legislate morality. Rather, the Church guards it and faithfully hands it on so that men and women in every generation will be able to make choices that lead to authentic human freedom and fulfillment.

By Anne Hendershott, Catholic World Report – George Soros’ Open Society Institute is often blamed for providing funding to faux Catholic organizations—like the now-defunct Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good—in an effort to marginalize Catholic teachings on moral issues including abortion and LGBTQ issues. But a more overt and focused assault on the teaching authority of the Catholic Church is now coming from a billionaire power couple—Tim Gill and Scott Miller—who are working to discredit Church teachings on sexual morality by directly attacking the Magisterium.

By John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist – The conflicts roiling American society today are not primarily political or even ideological, but religious… America is supposedly a secular country, with separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, and so on. Yet we find ourselves in the middle of what amounts to a religious war. How could this be?… Because America, like all nations, is founded on religious claims, and relies on those claims for its coherence.

By Evan Feinberg, USA Today – What if the solutions are bigger and smaller than most people think?… What happened at Possum Trot… That’s the message of “Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot,” a movie released this week. Named after a town in East Texas and based on a true story, it follows the story of dozens of local children who were taken from their families and put in foster care. Their lives were hard, and foster care made them harder. The kids were seemingly destined for a life of violence, jail, addiction, poverty and, in many cases, death.

By Ben Strong, LifeSite News – All young people dream of adventure, of a noble and worthy pursuit, of an unexpected call to set out on a quest. You can, therefore, imagine my excitement and delight, when, as a young man, I received the following note: I wonder if you might be in a position at this time to consider an adventure? For an adventure it shall be… It was an invitation to join an effort to start a small Catholic boarding school for boys – an invitation one doesn’t receive every day!

By Dr. Donald DeMarco, Catholic Exchange – The telephone rang at the Hayden household, deep in suburbia. It was a special consultant to the President for cultural affairs inviting Phyllis McGinley Hayden to the White House Festival of Arts.  Two thoughts crossed her mind, neither being the honor of being invited to the White House. She had to juggle her schedule to fit in an honorary degree at St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York. Her second thought was “Oh, I don’t like this!  I like to live quietly and peacefully.”

By Carrie Gress, The Federalist – For women, motherhood was largely erased as an essential and replaced with a vision of womanhood modeled after a masculine ideal. To maintain this new ideal for women — the pursuit of a career — women were sold the rabid dependence on contraception and abortion that we see today. It can be argued that feminism has been transitioning women into men for decades, with few noticing because of the enticing idols of achievement and independence.

By Adeline A. Allen, First Things – In the wake of the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling on in vitro fertilization (IVF), much discussion has focused on the status of embryos on ice, many of whom are the so-called “surplus” embryos created in the IVF process. Are they persons? Don’t they deserve legal protection? We pro-lifers answer both questions in the affirmative. The more robust the defense of the least of these, our tiny brothers and sisters, the better.

By Joe Bukuras, EWTN News – A New York City Catholic church, previously caught up in LGBT controversy, hosted a “Pride Mass” Thursday evening using an altar shrouded with a gay and transgender “pride” flag at a local federal monument with sculptures of two same-sex couples and decorated by dozens of LGBT rainbow flags… “Out at St. Paul” is St. Paul the Apostle church’s ministry “to the Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans and Queer community,” which is made up of “mostly gay men,” Paul Snatchko, a spokesman for the Paulist Fathers, told CNA, the Register’s sister news outlet, last year.

By Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap., The Catholic Thing – What troubles me almost as much as this gay-pride militancy is the Church’s ambiguous response. Pope Francis has bemoaned the “air” of homosexual culture within the Vatican and seminaries… Over the years, however, I have learned, as have many others, that one should not give much credence to what Pope Francis says. It is what he does that reveals his true intentions. What he has done in relationship to homosexuality bears clear testimony to this hermeneutical principle.

By John Murdock, First Things – Should I have been surprised that ReproductiveRights.gov exists? Joe Biden has shifted from touting his long record of supporting the Hyde Amendment and opposing late-term abortions to making unfettered abortion rights the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. But the “dot gov” should still matter, and it does to me as a federal employee… ReproductiveRights.gov offers resources for avoiding reproduction or snuffing out life in its early stages.

By Nathanael Blake, Catholic World Report – The thesis of Joy Pullman’s new book is that “Western society is being erased by the purposeful destabilization of the institution that creates society: the natural family…”… Remember when gay activists told us that they just wanted tolerance—and that their agenda wouldn’t affect the rest of us?… They lied… What was sold as tolerance for a small minority of Americans who just wanted to quietly live their lives has become a new, mandatory civil religion.

By Nancy Flory, The Stream – The United States should not have a foster care crisis. With approximately 350,000 churches nationwide and more than 100,000 kids in the foster system waiting for placement, this is an area where people of faith could make a big difference… And some of them have… A new family-friendly film, Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot is based on the true story of a church whose parishioners adopted 77 of the most difficult kids their community’s foster care system had to offer.

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture – In the marriage vows, the lovers pledge their troth “for better or worse.” They thereby acknowledge that they are entering into a relationship whose future cannot be predicted. They may be starry-eyed now, and naturally they expect to be happy together for years. But they know there are risks; things may get “worse.”… What does “worse” mean in a marriage? It may mean living together in illness or poverty. But it may also mean living together in a difficult relationship; the romance itself may become “better or worse.”

By Maureen Mullarkey, The Federalist – Pope Francis’ coy two-step on sexual mores hangs over Catholic culture like the sword of Damocles. Papal ambiguity weakens the Catholic Radio Association’s current effort to resist newly mandated reporting rules about workforce diversity. Driving the rules is an ideological ambition to demolish the scaffolding of traditional behavioral norms regarding sex.

By Hayden Daniel, The Federalist – It’s that time of year again. The time when, for 30 seemingly never-ending days (of “Pride Month.”), rainbow flags… take over entertainment, corporate logos, and the streets of cities across the country. Not even ruby-red states can escape the influence… The centerpiece of this debauched revelry is the “pride” parade. Now there are so many of these in the U.S. that some outlets feel the need to rank them, and even smaller locales feel the need to host festivities. With the growth of these processions as a nationwide phenomenon, the frequency of grown men showing up to them in full BDSM gear, stripper attire, or even just a diaper has also increased.

By Louis Knuffke, LifeSiteNews – The pro-LGBT advocacy group Outreach, run by Fr. James Martin, S.J., published an op-ed blasphemously arguing that the sexually immoral agenda of the rainbow “Pride Month” is compatible with the traditional devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus… Robert Bordone, who serves on the so-called “LGBTQIA Ministry Team” at the Paulist Center in Boston (responded) to remarks of Martha-Ann Alito, wife of SCOTUS Justice Samuel Alito, both devout Catholics… He wrote, “As a gay Catholic, however, I was most especially struck by the notion that the message of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Pride flag somehow stand in opposition to each other. Mrs. Alito’s comments are part of a broader trend in recent years in which some Catholics who oppose Pride celebrations seek to raise the profile of this feast day ….

By Steven Ertelt, LifeNews – The beauty of fatherhood is that it instills in men an unmistakable sense of mission and purpose, which speak to the masculine soul in a particularly profound way. And the rewards are too many to properly catalogue here, but a few that come to mind are the indescribable thrill of seeing your newborn’s face for the first time, the utter joy of witnessing the first steps of a one-year-old, the delight and satisfaction in witnessing your child surpass your own skills and abilities, the heart-melting experience of hearing your child say, “I love you.”

By John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., Catholic World Report – Catholic parents, heirs of social teaching that affirms their primacy in the educational enterprise, have a special mission to seize the moment and realign the misalignment of values operating in the American public school establishment. Children are parents’, not schools’. Parents, not schools, are the first and best educators of children. Schools work for parents and should not arrogate any more substantial “partnership.” Education exists for children, not for schools… And, if education exists for children, then educational dollars also exist for children, not schools. …

By Jordan Boyd, The Federalist – A Texas-based general surgeon who exposed his Houston children’s hospital for secretly continuing a child transgender mutilation program faces four felony counts from (Biden’s DOJ) for speaking out… Shortly after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered his state’s Dept. of Family and Protective Services to investigate the transing of children as abuse in 2022, Texas Children’s Hospital… claimed that it would no longer offer chemical castration and other body-butchering services to pediatric patients… As 33-year-old whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim soon discovered, however, at least three Texas Children’s physicians continued to castrate children as young as 11 years old after the program was allegedly halted. …

By Jennifer Roback Morse, EWTN News – The Vatican’s release of the document Fiducia Supplicans late last year created massive confusion throughout the Catholic world. How should faithful Catholics respond to this document? And perhaps more importantly, how should we respond to the issues the document purports to address?… After six months of observation and reflection, I would like to propose an answer. We should focus not on people who, for whatever combinations of reasons, seek to change the Church’s teaching on homosexual acts. Instead, we should focus on those persons who have journeyed away from an LGBT identity.

By Anthony Esolen, American Greatness – I have spent many years reading, writing, and thinking about family life and what kinds of things are good and innocent, healthy and soul-building, in the day of a child. One of the responses I typically get is that I am “romanticizing” a way of life that was peculiar to white people in the United States shortly after the second World War, ignoring all the evils which were attached to that way of life, such as racism, the exploitation of workers, and so forth. …

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Societies once almost universally respected the family and the rights of parents to raise and educate their children, recognizing the family’s unique role as the essential unit and “vital cell of society” (Familiaris consortio, 42). They upheld that parents have an irreplaceable responsibility and are best suited to teach and transmit cultural, social, spiritual, moral, and religious values that are not only essential for the good of the family itself, but also are essential for the good of society.

By Kate Quiñones, Catholic News Agency – Archdiocese of Denver Catholic preschools will now be allowed to participate in Colorado’s universal preschool (UPK) program after a federal court ruled Tuesday that the state’s decision to exclude Catholic preschools was unconstitutional.
Two Catholic parishes with preschools… as well as a Catholic family and the Archdiocese of Denver asked the Denver federal court to stop the Department of Early Childhood from excluding them from the UPK program because they prioritize the admission of Catholic families and have religious expectations for teachers.

By Genevieve Harding, LifeNews – Washington, DC – Today Democrats in the U.S. Senate will hold a vote on Senator Ed Markey’s (D-MA) so-called “Right to Contraception Act,” more accurately titled the Payouts for Planned Parenthood Act. This misleading bill would funnel money to abortion giant Planned Parenthood, override conscience protections and create a “right” to abortion drugs.

By Rachel Watkins, Catholic Exchange – The school year is ending, and the spectrum of emotions that come along with it are a myriad. For many people, this time of year means nothing more than the peace that comes with not worrying about school busses during the morning commute. But for others, this time of year comes with many more emotions… For some parents, their children love their teachers and schools, the parents love their teachers and schools, and all is well… For many who homeschool it is the same; their children are happy, and they are happy.

By Anthony Esolen, The Catholic Thing – We are trying to rebuild the sheepfold. It is a thankless task. The ground has been turned to mud. The blood and bones of slaughtered sheep are everywhere. Neighbors are laughing and throwing stones. The sheep have wandered astray. The sheepdogs have been breeding with the wolves… If a bishop cannot help, he might at least have the grace to quit kicking down the posts. If he cannot bless us, he might at least not curse us. He might get out of the way.

By Marie Meaney, D.Phil., Catholic World Report – Nothing but God can truly satisfy the restless human heart. But there’s a hierarchy to things, to what is more important and what is less so… Much ink has been spilled on Harrison Butker’s recent commencement speech at Benedictine College. Given the indignant articles and commentary in so many places, one would have thought that Butker wanted women to remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen without ever venturing into the professional world. …

By McKenna Snow, Catholic Vote – Pope Francis has apologized for his use of a deprecating slang term against gay men in seminaries… “The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he extends his apologies to those who felt offended by the use of a term, reported by others”… “Pope Francis is aware of the articles that came out recently about a conversation, behind closed doors, with the bishops of the CEI (Italian Episcopal Conference)”… during the May 26 meeting with the bishops of the CEI, “Pope Francis used demeaning Italian slang to highlight that openly gay men should not be admitted to Italian seminaries.”

By Janet E. Smith, Crisis Magazine – Last summer, when Fr. Alex Mugalaasi from Uganda invited me to visit to speak in five seminaries, each with 250 seminarians and about 20 priest faculty, I jumped at the proposal. And, oh, am I happy that I did! It was clearly an opportunity of a lifetime and a divine appointment… The Church in Uganda is strong and needs to stay strong; it is under powerful attack from Western influence which wants it to ditch “traditional values” and embrace the LGBTQ+ agenda of the West. …

By Jay Thomas, First Things – As the father of two young boys—and the spiritual father of many more—I am increasingly concerned about the state of young men in our disintegrating society. Our culture is producing adult-sized boys and infantile men. Absent real challenge or adventure and without an established masculine community handing down the rites and responsibilities of maturity, boys are often bereft. They need more than a desk or a sports team. These concerns led me to the Blue Ridge.

By Clare Marie Merkowsky, LifeSiteNews – Jason Evert reached even more young people after a group of self-professed witches targeted his chastity talks at three Catholic schools in Sydney, Australia… On May 19, a group of witches in Sydney, Australia, celebrated cancelling Evert’s talks at three Catholic schools but did not realize this would result in Evert reaching even more young people, as three other schools quickly booked Evert, with one of the schools livestreaming the talk to eight additional high schools. …

By Anne Hendershott, Catholic World Report – …then again, the United States is an outlier in monetizing and commodifying the creation of designer children on demand. Rejecting previous concerns about how sex selection could raise concerns about creating societal gender imbalances and would lead to the destruction of normal embryos of the non-desired gender, few seem concerned about discrimination against female children now that according to the most recent reports, it appears white couples in the United States prefer girls.

By Msgr. Charles Pope – … most all of us have heard of the uproar regarding Harrison Butker’s commencement address at Benedictine College. Of course he also has many supporters, of which I am one… The negative reaction on the “woke” left is, sadly, more of the same “cancel calls” from those who so often shout, diversity, equity and and Inclusion. As is most often the case, they don’t really mean “DEI” for those who oppose their views. Theirs is a very qualified and limited diversity and inclusion. It is one thing to oppose what Harrison Butker said, but it is another to demand he be sanctioned, fired, or severely fined. In effect, too many of the “woke” demand that he must not be allowed any access to the public square, the NFL or any public forum; he must be silenced.

By Bishop James Conley, Substack – Since my conversion to the Catholic Church in college, I have always known my total dependence on God, recognizing this as a defining feature of the human condition. I believed Jesus’ words, “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5), but this truth became twisted with a lie. I had been raised according to the common American stereotype of the self-made man who solves every problem himself. When things aren’t going well, he doesn’t show weakness, he just works harder. As a Christian, I adapted this to: he prays and works harder.

By Karen Mahoney, Catholic World Report – Dr. Kloess is board-certified by the American Academy of Family Physicians and a member of the Catholic Medical Association. His medical interests include natural family planning, women’s healthcare, wilderness medicine, and medical ethics… “I wanted to practice consistent with my faith and once I got into my practice, I had difficulty being able to do that,” Dr. Kloess explained. “I looked for opportunities that might allow it, but they were few and far between.”

By Michael Toscano, First Things – Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, appears uncowed by Big Tech. Inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s new book Anxious Generation (which I reviewed favorably in American Affairs), on May 6, Sanders sent a letter to her fellow governors in all fifty states, exhorting them to “work together” in rescuing America’s children from the “dark sewer of social media and screen addiction.”

By Al Perrotta, The Stream – ..we’re witnessing history being made… Chief’s Owner’s Wife Defends Kicker Harrison Butker; Even Bill Maher Is Blasting Left’s Effort to Cancel Him… For the first time in the history of the NFL, people are paying attention to something a kicker has to say. In this case, the media and the Left continue having a fit over Kansas City Chief’s kicker Harrison Butker’s advocacy for parenthood… But here’s the good news. The people are with Butker.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you’” (49:14-15)… Elsewhere, Isaiah writes this evocative passage: “As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (Is 66: 13). The Psalmist uses much the same analogy, writing, “Like a child quieted at its mother’s breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord” (Ps 131:2-3).

By Anthony Esolen, The Catholic Thing – In his speech, the young man said that the greatest of all titles for a woman is that of a wife and mother, and as he did so he praised his wife, and came to the point of tears. For saying what was not controversial when I was young, but what is abominated now, he has been the target of abuse and hatred… The Sisters of Saint Scholastica, whose forebears founded Benedictine College, sneered at the “limited” vision of homemaking that Butker admired …

By Ann Burns, Crisis Magazine – All of these claims are unfounded. Butker is not advocating for a new face of Catholicism, nor is he promoting the 1950s. After all, if the 1950s were so idyllic, the heinous push for birth control, abortion, and sexual license would not have followed in the 1960s. Reading this kind of agenda into his speech reveals our own misconceptions of what it means to be traditional. Tradition has nothing to do with poodle skirts or watching Leave It to Beaver and everything to do with rejecting the heresies of modernism. Or as Butker explains, it means fearlessly living out our Faith, knowing full well it is wildly countercultural.

By Douglas Andrews, Patriot Post – The Kansas City Chiefs’ devout Catholic kicker gave a stirring commencement speech, and the woke Left went ballistic… I’m not a Kansas City Chiefs fan. But I just became a Harrison Butker fan… “I’m on this stage today,” he said, “and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school… would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker..”

By Brianna Lyman, The Federalist – Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker is being dragged for stating during a 2023 commencement address that one of the most important titles a woman can have is “homemaker.” But as a young, college-educated woman myself, I wish someone had told me those things years ago… Throughout my college years, female students were encouraged to develop a sense of hyper-independence. Get your degree. Enter the workforce. Rise to the top. You don’t need a man!

By Stephen Kokx, LifeSite News – Former Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland and current San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone are among the first prominent clergy in the United States to express public support for Harrison Butker after the star NFL kicker came under attack from mainstream media outlets for delivering a pro-family commencement address at Benedictine College last Saturday in Atchison, Kansas… Strickland and Cordileone both issued statements on X this week praising Butker for his speech, which has caused leftists and sports pundits alike to flip out because he had the audacity to suggest female graduates might find more meaning raising children than in professional accolades.

By Catholic Vote – Christians on X are rallying behind Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker for his commencement speech at a Catholic college in Kansas, especially after his remarks were met with backlash from the NFL and secular media… Butker encouraged the Benedictine College graduates on May 12 “to be authentically and unapologetically Catholic,” as CatholicVote previously reported… In the speech, he condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, “Pride month,” and euthanasia. …

By Katrina Trinko, Daily Caller – But Butker isn’t drawing widespread ire because of his lack of nuance. He’s drawing widespread ire because he advocated a viewpoint that goes against our elites’ mentality, because he pushed back against the worldly idea that career success is what matters most, not our relationships and time with our loved ones… He’s drawing hate because, despite women’s happiness declining over the past 50 years, corporate America doesn’t want to hear that many moms would be happier if they could stay at home with their kids, or if their jobs were more accommodating to prioritizing family.

By John Zmirak, The Stream – Over at The Christian Post, you’ll find a story that at first might depress you. On second thought, it ought to cheer you up. And then on deeper reflection, it should sober you profoundly, and remind you of the life-or-death, heaven-or-hell war in the trenches that all Christians are engaged in.

By Theoni Bell, EWTN News – As mothers, we respond whenever someone gets hurt. We show compassion when feelings are crushed. We “take care” when someone is sick. No matter what we are engaged in, we know our whole day will go on pause if anyone in the family is wounded… When a family experiences the loss of a baby, “going on pause” is exactly what needs to happen because everyone in the family is wounded. Whether a mom suffers an early pregnancy loss, stillbirth or infant death, or the death of a child through illness or accident, no one should ever feel guilty to take time to grieve and heal.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Spirit & Life Blog, Human Life International – Christians typically speak of God as our “Father.” This is for good reason. Christ Himself spoke in His prayers to the “Father.” When asked by his apostles to teach them how to pray, He taught them a prayer that we now know as the Our Father (The Lord’s Prayer)… And yet, in his apostolic letter on the “dignity of women,” Mulieris dignitatem, Pope St. John Paul II says, “in many passages [of Scripture] God’s love is presented as the ‘masculine’ love of the bridegroom and father (cf. Hosea 11:1-4; Jer 3:4-19), but also sometimes as the ‘feminine’ love of a mother” (no. 8).

By Robin Turner, The Stream – When I was a young girl, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. As far back as I can remember, I would tell them I wanted to be a wife and mother. I even dressed up as a homemaker for career day in the ninth grade. I chose this as my career, and I think it’s the most rewarding job there is… But in spite of my strong maternal instincts, there are days when I feel as if I’m fighting a losing battle when it comes to training my children.

By Catholic Vote – A priest in the Diocese of Oakland, California, stated in a Thursday column for Outreach that his parishioners “applauded” when he came out as “gay” during a homily… “After I made the announcement, I looked into the congregation, and there were many LGBTQ people in tears,” wrote Fr. Aidan McAleenan. “At the end of the homily, the congregation rose in rapturous applause.”… “[W]ith time, I saw how my announcement had actually increased the bond between the parish and myself,” McAleenan continued.

By Dr. Jeff Mirus, Catholic Culture – The recent exchange of letters discussing transgendered persons between Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Pope Francis led Sister Jeannine to write an article about it which was jointly and propagandistically published on the New Ways Ministry’s daily blog and in the National Catholic Reporter. One hardly knows what to make of this exchange, which is why we must think more deeply than these correspondents did in order to make sense of the issue. …

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – By the end of the year, Kitty had been raped multiple times. She also had been repeatedly subjected to sexual violence, of a sort that has become shockingly common… Ultimately, Kitty blamed her disturbing sexual encounters on the easy accessibility of online pornography, in which men “can scroll through an endless stream of videos in which women are hurt and humiliated, in which men are aggressive and entitled and physically abusive. The existence of these videos on porn sites suggests that these things are sexy.”

By Peachy Keenan, The American Mind, The Claremont Institute – We don’t have to fight the Left; they are dying out all by their lonesomes… It’s time for me and the other “far-right” natalists to admit defeat. Liberals are committing genetic suicide and going extinct, despite our efforts to talk them out of it. They are running right off the cliff and into oblivion. New baby data shows that last year saw the lowest American birth rate ever. It’s the lowest since they started tracking it. Yikes! …

By Joy Pullmann, The Federalist – The bureaucracy that controls Western life is feminized, the longhouse argument goes; implying that women have won. But is that true? Is it “winning” for women to wield power at the expense of their sexual counterparts, the other half of humanity, without which there is no humanity? Are women happier ostensibly being in charge? It seems obvious the answer to that is a resounding no.

By Brian Mark Weber, The Patriot Post – As birth rates across the West are declining, conservatives know there’s a simple solution… From rampant inflation to campus riots to yet another trial for Donald Trump, there’s no lack of news headlines these days. While the 24/7 news cycle captures just about everything happening in major cities and small towns alike, some of the biggest stories are ignored… One of these stories is the declining birth rate in the West. …

By Gavin Ashenden, Katherine Bennett, Mark Lambert, Catholics Unscripted – The conversation discusses the document Dignitas Infanata issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in the Catholic Church, which addresses transgender theory. The hosts express frustration that it took the Church so long to address this issue and highlight the importance of good teaching on the topic. They also discuss the Cass review, which criticized the NHS for its approach to gender identity services for children and young people. …

By Christopher Manion, The Wanderer – Last week we saw how Joe Biden considers his support of abortion until birth to be his reelection campaign’s “silver bullet.”… But abortion isn’t the only round in his chamber. The Obama-era leftovers that populate the executive branch are skilled at utilizing their bureaucratic swagger to impose illegal and binding rules on the population at large in myriad ways, usually under the guise of “regulations.” A lot of them… And while 2024 might be Joe’s last gasp, they are far from finished.

By Oliver Oliveros, Catholic Exchange – Admittedly, it will take more than a moral attitude to prevail over lust. It is a mistake to look at it solely as a flaw in human behavior. One must also see that there is an adversary who plans for our demise… Growing up in Catholic school, the concept of spiritual warfare was treated as an afterthought. Yet, many saints and the church fathers discussed it, and it was certainly an important part of our Savior’s ministry. But because of the oversight, I had the naïve idea that as long as you were not possessed, you did not have to worry about the demonic realm.

By Emma Waters, Daily Signal – In a recent sting operation, the FBI arrested and charged a Chicago man for knowingly distributing material on child sexual assault and boasting about sexually abusing his young nieces and nephews… The man’s arrest came less than a week before he and another man identified as his husband were set to collect their newborn son from a commercial surrogate in California… Commercial surrogacy is a contractual agreement where someone pays a woman to gestate and birth an unrelated child for a fee. …

By Eduardo J. Echeverria, The Catholic Thing – Homosexual love is not a gift, indeed, it is a false love, because it is incapable of fulfilling the vocation to chastity, of perfecting the being of the person and developing his existence; and hence of being ordered to the natural law, the order of Creation, and hence to God. As a disordered form of love, it not only lacks integration but is a counter-integration by virtue of being an offense against the vocation to chastity, making it unable to realize the integrity of the person and the integrality of the gift of self.

By Joe Doyle, Catholicism.org – According to Politico and the State House News Service, the Catholic Schools Foundation—the philanthropy which raises funds for parochial schools in the Archdiocese of Boston—hosted Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey as its speaker, at the organization’s Annual Gala in Boston, on Thursday night, April 11th… Healey is a partnered lesbian, endorsed by Planned Parenthood, who has credited the nation’s largest abortion perpetrator as the force which made possible her political career.

By Emily Zanotti, National Catholic Register – The (birth control) pill is known to have a number of side effects. The Mayo Clinic acknowledges that women may suffer everything from minor headaches, stomach pain, and breakthrough bleeding, to heart attacks and strokes, deep vein thrombosis, and liver disorders. It also lists several of the most common influencer complaints as potentially concerning developments in need of immediate medical attention: headaches, belly pain, dizziness, nausea and depression.

By Daniel B. Gallagher, Catholic World Report – How can a magisterial document with a subheading consisting of three short paragraphs dedicated to the “relational structure of the human person” not even mention the family?… The expressed intent of the recent declaration of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is to “illuminate different facets of human dignity that might be obscured in many people’s consciousness” (Dignitas Infinita, Presentation). To the extent that the Declaration—though not intended to be comprehensive—selects topics that are indeed heavily “obscured” today, it succeeds.

By John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., Catholic World Report – Carney’s book is a superbly written tour de force contending that multiple cumulative socio-cultural factors are responsible for the current family-unfriendly environment. Culture is like the atmosphere: it’s usually invisible but necessary—and when contaminants get into it, they spread in many unforeseen ways, often overlapping with each other while boosting their mutual toxicity. Carney insists that what ails family formation and support in the United States today is, at root, cultural. That’s important, because it saves us from spinning our wheels ineffectively in places that won’t ultimately effect change (e.g., government or economics). …

By Steve Wilson, Just the News – The House Committee on Education approved a bill that will end the requirement that requires state approval for homeschooling curriculums… House Bill 550, by Rep. Beryl Amedee, R-Gray, would end the requirement home study programs be approved by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education… Amedee said she homeschooled her three sons and she’s worked as an advocate to help other parents with homeschooling issues, which she says includes eight pages of law governing homeschooling.

By Founder and President Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse spoke at the recent Live Action Young Leaders Summit about how the Sexual Revolution came about and the many rotten fruits it has produced. Watch as she explains its three interlocking branches: contraception ideology, divorce ideology, and gender ideology… Learn how these aspects of our culture are ruining lives and society, and why the traditional biblical view of morality is the solution to our broken world.

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Studies show that marriage is an excellent predictor of happiness… What’s the status of marriage in America today? The good news is that since 2012 there has been an increase in the number of children being raised in intact families, says Dr. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the author of Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization. …

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – What do they mean by describing children and marriage as “penalties”? Well, they are stating their analysis from a purely materialistic perspective. A child, you see, sets a woman back in her career; it takes her years to recover lost ground, and in many cases, she never fully recovers her pre-family income and employment trajectory… Labeling a child as a “penalty” demeans the most important work a person can do — raising and nurturing children ….

By Jim Kenaston, The Stream – Despite all the uproar over the White House’s official proclamation of “Transgender Day of Visibility” being observed on Easter Sunday this year, it turns out it’s just one of 47 commemoration days or weeks that the LGBTQ+ community has sprinkled throughout the year — not including the entire month of June, which has been proclaimed “Pride Month.” Until last week, I was unaware that in 2009 an activist had declared March 31 to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

By Michael Nevradakis Ph. D., The Defender, Children’s Health Defense – Mark Blaxill, father of an autistic adult daughter (discusses) what he called the ‘coming tsunami’ of autism caregiving, as the autistic children of the 1990s onward reach adulthood… Every year this time, public health officials, the media, and some autism organizations tell us how autism should be celebrated and embraced – how it’s a condition more akin to a quirk than a lifelong disability, one for which a growing number of diagnoses is a sign of “inclusivity.”

By Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, MRC TV – The MRC has reported on other groups sounding the alarm on these treatments. In July, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) acknowledged that puberty blockers have the potential to cause sterility, though that group continued to advocate for using tax dollars to fund said treatments. In March of this year, the National Health Service (NHS) in England banned puberty blockers for minors, citing studies

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Maybe the White House should try promoting this celebration… In light of the White House urging all Americans to celebrate its third annual Transgender Day of Visibility, the Ruth Institute has discerned the need for Adult Appreciation Week, set to take place April 3-9… “’Transgender’ people are not the only ones who need and deserve ‘visibility,’” said President Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse… Therefore, the group will officially honor adults who …..

By Mary Harrington, First Things – No one is coming to save us. We cannot wait for the “silent majority” to rise up and demand a return to common sense, or mumble about postponing action until we’ve re-Christianized the West, or until we’ve devised a fully worked-out post-Christian metaphysics of human nature… We must speak the truth anyway. And wherever possible, we must redirect law and policy from the abolition of human nature to its flourishing… Should this project be accused of oppressing or stigmatizing “the vulnerable,” we must recall that in reasserting the necessity of norms we are not attacking the most vulnerable. We are defending them.

By Joan Frawley Desmond, EWTN News – W. Bradford Wilcox, by contrast urges the young to drop a “me first” approach to love and marriage in favor of a “family first” path to the altar. In his latest book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization (HarperCollins), the University of Virginia sociologist, who also serves as director of the National Marriage Project, deploys a trove of research and data to back his claim that marriage and children bring personal fulfillment. …

By Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative – No conspiracy theory is as far-fetched as the idea that there are 72 genders… Ask anyone in your life to define a ‘conspiracy theory,’ and you’ll likely get a different answer. From elections to vaccines, from the ‘deep state’ to Ukraine, there is only one thing that most people now agree on: that establishment narratives are false. There are a range of key contributing factors to this—the internet and social media, the collapse of trust in institutions, increasing polarization, and much more. But one prominent issue that has proven to be a catalyst for all these trends has been largely ignored: the rise of the transgender movement.

By Charles J. Russo, Catholic World Report – Despite an acute shortage of caregivers willing and able to be respite or placement resources for children and youth in need, officials forbade a Christian couple in Washington from serving as foster parents… Discrimination against Christians continues unabated as for the third time in four years public officials have sought to not allow qualified Christians to serve as foster or adoptive parents because they reject the current orthodoxy on gender ideology.

By Susan Ciancio, Catholic World Report – “My value doesn’t come from what I can do. It comes from who I am—a human being created in the image and likeness of God.”… To celebrate World Down Syndrome Day last week, the family of three-year-old Will Daub, or Iron Will (as they call him), created a brilliant video in the hopes of sharing Will’s accomplishments with the world and to illustrate the beauty of people with Down syndrome. …

By Kurt Zindulka, Breitbart – The practice of sexually ‘transitioning’ children will be remembered as one of the “greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine,” a report commissioned by French senators stated… (the report) found that the medical industry embarked upon the practice of giving children life-altering transgender treatments with little evidence of its effectiveness while ignoring the side effects… The report found that while parents were often pressured by doctors to put their children on puberty-blocking drugs to prevent suicide, there is little proof that this course of action has any better outcomes for the child.

By Nathanael Blake, Catholic World Report – We should not expect much courage from politicians, but Christians are called to bear witness to the truth, regardless of what opinion polls show. And the truth is that IVF is wrong… When my wife and I said “No” to in vitro fertilization, we assumed that we were rejecting our last hope of bearing children. Our years of infertility were unexplained and unresolved, despite the best efforts of the Catholic Ob/Gyn practice we had been going to. They had been thorough, and the physician who offered us a second opinion had nothing to add—except pushing us to try IVF.

By Ashley McGuire, Institute for Family Studies – I can’t remember the last article I wrote that led to more unsolicited positive feedback; many wrote to me with their own additions to my short list of suggestions. Movies like Singing in the Rain, The Music Man, and Swiss Family Robinson were notable standouts. However, my list was admittedly male-dominant, and I recently found myself craving a little Scarlett O’Hara spice. So, one rainy afternoon while home alone with my daughter and nothing pressing on my time, we turned it on.

By Lou Aguilar, American Spectator -But the biggest blast took place across the Pond in the socialist-sinking United Kingdom. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) just stopped prescribing puberty blockers for children. For the left-compromised ministry to basically acknowledge the irreparable damage these treatments can do to kids should start a chain reaction of sanity around the world. Even the usually reserved Times of London called the practice “quack medicine,” urging that it be “reined in entirely.”

By Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative – I first came across investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek’s work in 2020, when her essay “The Billionaires Behind the LGBT Movement” was published in First Things. It was a stunning piece … Bilek also runs the Substack Jennifer’s Newsletter and the blog The 11th Hour, where she explains her focus: I write at the intersection of humanity, technology, and runaway capitalism. At this intersection stands transgenderism, what I believe is a glamorous ad campaign generated by elites, invested in tech and pharma, to normalize the changing of human biology. …

By Kale Zelden, Catholic World Report – The growing youth mental health crisis… In Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Shrier now turns her attention to the mental health establishment itself, asking the simple but obvious question: why are our kids so messed up? This book will likewise make very few friends for Shrier, as she is taking on a behemoth of under-appreciated size and reach, a new Leviathan—the Mental Health machine. But that is to her credit. What she lays out in her new book is important for everyone in the fields of medicine and education. But, most importantly, those of us with skin in the game: parents.

By Jonathon Van Maren, The European Conservative – Around 25% of Gen Z in America now identify as LGBT, compared to 3% of the general population… How do nations become post-Christian? To quote Ernest Hemingway: Gradually, and then suddenly… For decades, the United States has been a bastion of religiosity, bucking the trend of secularization, but in recent years, the needle has begun to move. According to a 2019 poll, between 20% and 25% of American adults now identify as ‘nones’ ….

By Evan Poellinger, CNS News – The Fifth Circuit Court of appeals has ruled 2-1 in favor of a Texas law requiring pornography websites to use age verification on their websites. The law, which was signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) last June, and originally scheduled to take effect in December, 2023, mandates such websites “use reasonable age verification methods” in order to “verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older.”

By Tyler Arnold, Catholic News Agency – While some lawmakers and transgender activists have claimed that puberty-blocking drugs and transgender surgical procedures are “life-saving medicine,” the study disputes that claim. The research did not find any statistically significant reduction in suicides among adolescents who received “medical gender reassignment” through hormonal or surgical interventions.

By Charles Collins, Catholic Herald – A new study claims one-in-three young adults in the United States will never marry… Writing for the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), Lyman Stone said these are close to the lowest levels ever observed for marriage rates… “Many commentators will blame these declines on the increased delay in marriage. While there’s some truth to this, the situation is extreme at higher ages, too,” he wrote…

By Peter Pinedo, Catholic News Agency – Since the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are human children, debate over fertility treatment has erupted anew… Here’s everything you need to know… What is IVF?… IVF is a medical procedure that fuses sperm and egg in a lab environment to conceive a child outside of the sexual act. The live embryo is then later implanted into a uterus to continue developing until birth… According to the Mayo Clinic, IVF is typically used as a “treatment for infertility” that “also can be used to prevent passing on genetic problems to a child.”

By Chuck Mason, The Stream – A Catholic couple’s fight with Indiana Child Services to raise their “transgender” son according to their faith provides a shot across the bow to all Christian parents — if a child’s gender preference is not accepted, Child Protective Services (CPS) will take the child away… Fox News reported Indiana CPS removed a child from his Catholic parents because they wouldn’t use his chosen name or pronouns that reflected his chosen gender orientation. CPS relocated the male child, who identifies as female, to a “gender-affirming” foster home after the child reported his parents to the authorities. …

By Carrie Gress, The Catholic Thing – The idea that Catholics must embrace feminism to engage non-Catholic women has been repeated so frequently that it’s simply accepted as a truism. But is it actually working? … Before answering that question, let’s take a close look at the work of St. John Paul II. He is generally invoked as the reason why we must have a Catholic feminism. As pope, John Paul was clearly interested in upholding the dignity of every woman. His 1988 Apostolic Letter, Mulieris Dignitatem ….

By Kennedy Hall, Crisis Magazine – No amount of money or personal development in education or the business world is worth the pain that comes with the regret of closing yourself to new life… Last weekend we decided to take a trip across the border to Port Huron, Michigan, to do a bit of shopping. Like the majority of Canadians who make the same international trip in search of lower prices and cheap gas, we shopped at Hobby Lobby, Target, and T.J. Maxx. I may have stopped into Wild Bill’s Tobacco Shop to stock up…Who am I kidding?

By Philip Martin, Crisis Magazine – Nearly 2,000 years later, the reality of God’s Fatherhood is more necessary, perhaps, than it has ever been. Every person has father wounds, no matter how great your father was. If he was imperfect, he left wounds by his words and actions (or lack thereof); if he was, for all intents and purposes, perfect, he set a nearly impossible standard that you probably never felt you could live up to… But if he was there, if he tried, count your blessings; if he worked hard with you in mind, offer up a prayer of thanksgiving.

By Jules Gomes, Church Militant – A celebrity homosexual couple who intends to conceive a child through surrogacy has made history after the Vatican permitted the blessing of the duo at a “religious wedding” held two days after their civil wedding. Father Francisco Gordalina blessed Uruguayan television personality 82-year-old Carlos Perciavalle and his 47-year-old partner Jimmy Castilhos at a party for 400 guests. The couple publicly advertised it as “the first [Catholic] religious wedding in the world” of its kind.

By Genesius, Catholic Stand – Over the past few months, I have attended two funerals. At both of them, elderly widowers were mourning their deceased wives. Both of the couples were married for more than 65 years… Both instances were a tribute to the sacrament of marriage. Both of the deceased were true to their vows made before God to love and honor their spouses “all the days of my life.” How wonderful that their marriages endured in a world actively trying to kill and pervert this sacrament.

By Louis Brown, First Things – Tragically, it is not rare for health care entities to refuse patients life-sustaining nutrition. As a result, patients can end up dying not because of an illness but because of starvation. This kind of passive euthanasia is just the tip of the iceberg of the throwaway culture that pervades much of American health care. The United States urgently needs to revitalize its respect for the dignity of patients and protect their human and civil rights. ….

By Samuel Mangold-Lenett, The Federalist – “The outrageous sacrilege perpetrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral is indeed a hate crime,” Burch wrote. “Video footage shows that transgender activists intentionally used deception to obtain permission to enter St. Patrick’s and the facts show that access was used to desecrate that sacred space and mock Catholic faith and morals.”

CV News Feed – The organization Gays & Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society (GLITS) on Tuesday announced that it would hold a press conference Wednesday “to request an explanation from St. Patrick’s Cathedral” for what they described as “cutting short the funeral mass service of Cecilia Gentili.”… In a press release sent via email, GLITS stated that its press conference would be held at noon on Wednesday, February 21, at City Hall Park. The organization said it will demand “a public apology” for the “painfully dismissive and exclusionary language” the Cathedral used in a statement after the scandalous incident.

By Mrs. Sheryl Temaat, The Remnant – What Marriage Was Before Vatican II… A man and woman give valid consent on their wedding day when they agree to take each other in marriage. This means that they agree to exchange the conjugal act exclusively, permanently, and be open to children… Marriage, before Vatican II, was about having children and raising them for heaven.

By John M. Grondelski, Ph.D., Catholic World Report – There are two unusual things about this book: It’s coming out for Valentine’s Day. And the title is a simple, strong imperative… The release of Get Married was deliberately planned to coincide with the end of National Marriage Week, an annual focus on the importance of marriage that ends on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And the book’s title commands us to do something for which that earlier generations did not seem to need an order.

By Steven Ertelt, LifeNews – The absence of fathers is identified as the fundamental cause of many societal issues today, supported by extensive research presenting clear and indisputable evidence: children need good fathers… As per the 2020 U.S. Census, 18.4 million children are growing up without their biological fathers. This accounts for 23% of the total 73 million children in the U.S., marking a significant increase since 1968.

By Katrina Trinko, Daily Signal – If you’re not looking to date this Valentine’s Day, be grateful… It’s a disaster out there… Pair the lingering effects of the sexual revolution, of a world where too often sexual pleasure is prioritized over relationships founded on love and giving, with Big Tech’s noxious dating apps, where algorithms seem far better at perpetuating singledom than finding people soulmates, and you’ve got a hellscape.

By Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, MRC TV – The Herrings were reportedly going through marital struggles back in 2022 but decided to start working on their relationship more as time went on. In February, Mrs. Herring became pregnant. Then, starting in March, Mr. Herring began slipping the pill Cyrux, an abortion pill sold in Mexico, into his wife’s drinks. (Cyrux is the same as misoprostol, the first of two pills taken to chemically kill a child in utero and force a miscarriage.)

The Editors, EWTN News – The secular world will fix its attention Sunday on the Super Bowl — an annual sporting spectacle that will be played this year in Las Vegas… On that same Sunday, the Catholic Church’s celebration of World Marriage Day should direct our attention to an institution that’s infinitely more important than a mere football game — yet recent events have left many Catholics concerned about whether the significance of marriage is being sidelined within the Church itself.

By Elizabeth Yore, Yore Children – In three very short years, a silent and surreptitious invasion was underway. A war is being organized by enemies from many countries who were invited in by the Biden Administration to destroy us.  These are the times that will test the souls of every American. Pay attention to the final warning from the 10 brave retired FBI patriots: “The threat we call out today is new and unfamiliar. In its modern history the U.S. has never suffered an invasion of the homeland, and, yet, one is unfolding now. Military age men from across the globe, many from countries or regions not friendly to the United States, are landing in waves on our soil by the thousands – not by splashing ashore from a ship or parachuting from a plane but rather by foot across a border, but rather by foot across a border that has been accurately advertised around the world as largely unprotected with ready access granted.”

By The Catholic Herald – The Union of Catholic Mothers was founded in 1913 to unite Catholic married women in the UK. It is a national organisation which promotes the full ideal of marriage, Christian values in family life and Catholic religious education of children… UCM members are made aware of current social, political and medical policies at the national level, and are encouraged to individually lobby MPs as well as join campaigns for the alleviation of hunger, poverty and war, both at home and overseas.

By Thomas Gallatin, Patriot Post – The reason this story is so shameful — beyond the now-public sexual deviancy of a Senate staffer — is the blatant undermining of the foundational principles of our legal system. Treating any identity group as a privileged group for which the laws of the land are not enforced equally and without prejudice is to do injustice. Furthermore, arguing that because these groups may have suffered past injustices, they now deserve special treatment makes a mockery of the equal application of the law and further erodes confidence in our justice system.

By Tierin-Rose Manelburg, MRC TV – It’s a heartbreaking (video) clip, and viewers are calling out the transgender ideology for what it really is: “pure evil.”… In it, a mother and her 11-year-old son Joseph, who they refer to as “Josie,” visit a transgender specialist named Dr. Olsen, who insists that “Josie” is at a “perfect place” to begin puberty blockers to stop the young boy’s body from going through male puberty. ….

By Human Life International, The Stream – The powerful World Health Organization appears to be working hard to hasten the end of the human race, according to the global life-advocates at Human Life International. As the United Nation’s designated preserver of the world’s health, the new World Health Organization Pandemic Agreement is designed to increase disease and encourage unhealthy behaviors… This recent directive coming out of this international government body demands that all nations follow their lead to “counteract conservative opposition” and “enact progressive laws” ….

By Dan Hart, The Stream – Newly published data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that the proportion of American children living in two-parent families increased to 71.1% in 2023, continuing a slight upward trajectory since 2015… The numbers appear to contradict a popular narrative in the mainstream media that American society no longer aspires to establish households with a mother and father to parent children.

By McKenna Snow, Catholic Vote – A diaper company launched its pro-life campaign this week and quoted billionaire Elon Musk’s statement, “having children is saving the world,” in a large electronic billboard ad for the campaign in Times Square… Musk owns the social media platform “X,” formerly known as Twitter, and has previously expressed concern about the human race’s population decreasing. Musk posted on X in September of 2023, “having children is saving the world”.

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., Children’s Health Defense – Nearly 130 pregnant women and 25 children under age 2 were given the wrong respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)… The children were mistakenly administered either Pfizer’s Abrysvo or GSK’s (formerly GlaxoSmithKline) Arexvy RSV vaccines. Both are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for adults ages 60 and older — but not for children or babies.

By Katy Faust, The Federalist – Surrogacy is risky for children. Not just the risk of a primal wound via intentional birth mother separation. Not just the risk of identity struggles if their genetic mother is purchased from a catalog. Not just the risk of mother-hunger if they are raised in a home absent maternal love… Surrogacy puts children at risk for the worst kinds of abuse. …

By Randy Hain, Integrated Catholic Life – Remember, so often we tend to make things more complicated than they really are.  When it comes to priorities, many of us have a check list of some kind that includes everything from going to the grocery store for milk to making sure our children get a great education.  We confuse mundane tasks with what is truly important in life.  If everything is important, then nothing is important. When it comes to living a fuller, richer life filled with meaning, what are your priorities?

By J. Robert Renner, The Federalist – In 2009, Mattson returned to Catholicism and left behind his prior homosexual lifestyle. For several years, he wrote articles and spoke at public events explaining how the church should engage with people who experience same-sex attraction… In 2017, Mattson’s writing culminated in Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace — an autobiographical account of his experience with same-sex attraction. He advocated that the church should sympathetically engage people who experience same-sex attraction while offering Catholicism as a better way. …

By Art Ally, The Stream – For those of us who have been working for years on the pro-life cause, this is a very special and joyous Sanctity of Human Life Month… It’s the first one since the Supreme Court in June 2022 struck down Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion. Instead of the latest protest against Roe’s cruelty and unconstitutionality, this month-long observance and the annual March for Life on January 20 will be celebrations.

By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine – TV shows in the 1960s began pushing the envelope of what was allowed, and now we have full-blown depravity coming over the airwaves… In a recent debate about the success or failure of the Sexual Revolution, moderator Bari Weiss asked the four female debaters to name the feminist they admire the most. Feminist author Louise Perry said without hesitation, “Mary Whitehouse.”

By Fr. Bryce Lungren, Crisis Magazine – Prior to the 1960s, procreation may not have always been welcome, but it was very much understood as the natural purpose of the sexual act. The shift came during this decade when forms of artificial birth control, particularly the birth control pill, became readily available to the general public. Since then, contraception, which literally means against conception, has been the common mentality toward the sexual act.

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine – The upshot is that two boys or two girls should not be a couple at all because that exclusivity is not what friendship is for; it is, in fact, an obstacle to the full flourishing of friendship. … Two people, presenting themselves as a couple, approach a priest and ask for a blessing before the congregation in church… Let us think this matter through.

By Stephen Kokx, LifeSiteNews – In remarks shared exclusively with LifeSiteNews via video, Bishop Strickland encouraged “my brother bishops that we all join with a voice of strength and joy in the Lord in these last days of Advent and say ‘no’ to this latest document.”… “We really simply need to be a united voice saying, ‘no,’ we will not respond to this,” Strickland stated. “We will not incorporate this into the life of the Church because we simply must say ‘no.’ And it needs to be a united voice.”

By Michael Brown, The Stream – Think for a moment about the trajectory of LGBTQ+ activism… Had national leaders said up front, “We look forward to the day when thirteen-year-old, trans-identified girls can have full mastectomies and young men can compete against young women in sports,” they would have garnered much less support… Had they said, “We look forward to the day when Christians will be jailed if they refuse to grant gay marriage licenses, and we can’t wait to see drag queens reading to toddlers in libraries,” they would have been rejected outright.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – … for those of us who work to stem the tide of the culture of death, the name of Kissinger immediately serves to call to mind a single document—the so-called “Kissinger Report.”… The technical name of this document is National Security Study Memorandum 200… (also) called the Kissinger Report… in 1974 and was originally highly classified. However, researchers managed to obtain copies of it in the early 1990s. It outlines what Kissinger and the Nixon Administration viewed as the serious national security threats posed by population growth, particularly in the developing nations.

By Emma Waters, The Federalist – China not only owns a disproportionate amount of American debt, but a new report reveals it also rents a disproportionate number of American wombs… In July, researchers using data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology Clinic Outcome Reporting System found that Chinese nationals make up the largest percentage of foreign surrogacy contracts in the United States. ….

By Jennifer Roback Morse, EWTN News – The worldwide battle for counseling freedom for all will have far-reaching consequences for freedom of speech, religion, and association. The ostensible issue at stake is banning “conversion therapy,” which is claimed to be “harmful’ and “ineffective” and even the equivalent of “torture.”… But the ultimate issue at stake is whether sexual revolutionary activists can limit speech inside a counselor’s office, personal prayer and the ability of individual clients to associate with counselors who will assist them in achieving their own therapeutic goals.

By Katie Yoder, CNA – On Dec. 12 we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the patroness of the unborn… When Our Lady appeared to St. Juan Diego nearly 500 years ago, she came first and foremost as a mother — the mother of God and our mother… “Listen, and let it penetrate your heart, my dear little son; do not be troubled or weighted down with grief. Do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety, or pain,” Our Lady of Guadalupe is quoted as saying to Juan Diego. “Am I not here who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not your fountain of life? Are you not in the folds of my mantle? In the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else you need?”

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – “DINK” (Dual Income, No Kids) is an acronym that describes young couples, generally married, who have made the choice to not have children. They do so for many reasons, such as they want to diminish their environmental footprint or they don’t want to be like their parents and therefore won’t be parents at all. The most common reason, however, is the notion that being a DINK gives them freedom and autonomy that families with children don’t have. They can do what they want whenever they want ….

By Kayla Bartsch, National Review – The National Center for Health Statistics recorded nearly 50,000 suicides last year, up 2.6 percent increase from the prior year… The increase in suicides was largely driven by older Americans taking their own lives. Suicide rates for young people returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 after soaring in 2021 amid the social isolation and financial stress caused by the pandemic and resulting lockdowns. Suicide rates for children aged 10-14 declined by 18 percent in 2022, and rates for young people aged 15-24 declined by 9 percent.

By Katie Breckenridge, The Federalist – When children start to be commodified and viewed as objects to be disposed of in the quest to create families, society creates bills such as HBs 5207-5215, and children lose their natural, fundamental rights to life, to their mothers and fathers, and not to be bought and sold. Laws that trample on the natural rights of children under the guise of “equality” are not rights, but injustices promoting the inequality of the most vulnerable members of society.

By H. W. Crocker III, Crisis Magazine – At Lisbon’s 2023 World Youth Day, Bishop Robert Barron commented, We’ve dumbed down the faith for way too long. My generation got a dumbed down Catholicism and it’s been a pastoral disaster. And that’s not just my private opinion. You can see that in every survey. When you ask people why they disaffiliated, in the Western world anyway, they’ll often say “I never got my questions answered, religion seemed stupid, it’s out of line with science,” etc., etc. We dumbed down the faith in an attempt to make it relevant and we undermined ourselves. It’s a vibrant, smart, beautiful Catholicism that people find compelling.

By John Stonestreet, Jared Eckert, The Stream – Gen Z, the generation born between 1997 and 2010, has a distinct reputation different from baby boomers, Gen X, and millennials… One finding is that Gen Z — or Zoomers — are less likely to hold a part-time job, attend religious services, have a romantic relationship, and use drugs. They also spend more time online, are more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and report being more lonely than previous generations.

By McKenna Snow, CatholicVote – A priest shared encouraging advice this week on how parents can respond if their adult child leaves the Catholic Faith… “I always tell parents that you always have to have hope,” said Father Mark Wood from the Diocese of Little Rock, Arkansas, as he discussed the issue with local news outlet Arkansas Catholic on November 27.
Wood has spent 35 years as a priest, and said that he has seen how important it is for parents to live the Faith in the home. …

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing – Michigan, which in 2022 ensconced a right to abortion-on-demand into its state constitution, may be on the verge of another adaptation to the sexual revolution: adopting commercial surrogacy… The Great Lake State, along with Nebraska and to some degree Louisiana, are the three states that still outlaw commercial surrogacy.  “Commercial” surrogacy is distinguished from “altruistic” surrogacy, where the latter is nominally a volunteer undertaking.

By Church Militant, Church Militant – Disney is admitting its political stances have put the company at risk as it continues to flop at the box office in 2023… The Walt Disney Company acknowledged its disconnect with consumers in its latest SEC filings as the once-powerhouse brand continues to face pitfalls over its self-destructive ideological push… Disney wrote in the report, “Consumers’ perceptions of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to achieve certain of our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our reputation and brands.”

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – There is something about the transgender movement that has struck many people as fundamentally cultish… Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about cults: “Specific factors in cult behavior are said to include manipulative and authoritarian mind control over members, communal and totalistic organization, aggressive proselytizing, systematic programs of indoctrination, and perpetuation in middle-class communities.”

By Leila Marie Lawler, The Catholic Thing – Accepting the word “transgender” and using it in an official document represents a capitulation to an ideology that is completely contrary to, and the enemy of, the Catholic faith and indeed reality itself. This is not the first time, either. For years now, bishops have used this word in, for instance, statements on bills before legislatures on bathrooms and pronouns. They lose the argument before it begins, for defining terms is everything in seeking the truth and helping others find it.

By Susan Ciancio, Catholic World Report – The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “a wholesome family life can foster interior dispositions that are a genuine preparation for a living faith and remain a support for it throughout one’s life” (CCC, 2225)… This is our job as parents—to prepare our children to live a life faithful to the Church, a life filled with the love of Christ and with the desire to share His light with others. As we mark Catholic Schools Week and give thanks for these amazing schools, let’s remember that education begins at home—and that our primary job as parents is to teach our children the Catholic Faith.

By John Bursch, EWTN News – It is critically important to carefully read the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith’s answers to Bishop Negri’s questions in context — and to ignore silly headlines from media sources that do not understand Catholic teaching… If you’ve been watching the news, you were likely surprised to see clickbait headlines from mainstream outlets… “Vatican says transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents.” After all, such a headline conflicts directly with Pope Francis’ many declarations about gender ideology.

By John Zmirak, The Stream – Could you briefly explain what the Vatican “Synod” is?… What makes the present synod strange and unprecedented, in a subversive way, is that many of the participants are not bishops. Many lay people are included. If their ideological composition reflects that of the participating bishops, they are progressive and reformist… Francis has stated that this move to include lay people is to make the Church more open and democratic. There are good reasons to be suspicious.

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Dr. Morse gives her views on what we can take away from the happenings in Rome… Some crazy stuff is going on out there. Do we have to believe it all? Do we have to listen to what they say?… Dr. Morse shares what Catholics should do regarding the leadership of the Church.

By John Henry Westen, Michael Haynes, LifeSite News – Pope Francis has approved a text drawn up by Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández attesting that “transgender” individuals can be godparents for the sacrament of Baptism, as well as allowing homosexual “parents” to have their children baptized… Pope Francis’ latest document comes despite the fact that the Catholic Church teaches that deliberate bodily mutilation and homosexual acts are gravely sinful, and that those requesting Baptism for children must intend to raise the children in the Catholic faith.

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – As a noted psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Haidt noticed a change in students both socially and academically starting in 2012. Students are lonelier, not as intellectually engaged, and developing mental health problems at an alarming rate… What happened in 2012? Well, that was when smartphones really took off in the mainstream and flip phones went the way of the rotary dial.

By Ryan and Mary-Rose Verret, EWTN News – Humility. That’s what current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson emphasized when he and his wife Kelly interviewed us about our marriage mentoring program, Witness to Love… “I love that [in your mentorship model] there is a certain dose of humility,” he said. “We have to acknowledge that we have certain issues to work on. You realize in our journey in life how only God is perfect and we are not.” The interview, which you can listen to here, was about how we can better support “marriage, the center of our culture.”

By Joseph Pronechen, National Catholic Register – Following their successful first Into the Breach video series and taking a cue from the attacks on marriage in secular society, the Knights of Columbus have just released another video series called Into the Breach: The Mission of the Family — to strengthen Catholic marriages and Catholic families… Looking at marriage as the foundation of the family, the gift of children, healing in the family, creating a legacy of faith and more, the six parts bring not only words of wisdom… but also beautiful stories and advice from marriage couples in the pews ….

By Julian Kwasniewski, Catholic Exchange – Family is essential to the creation of any culture, Kirsten remarked. “What is culture? It is the common life of a community and that is impossible without a family first of all, and the children to pass it onto. You need a husband and wife to create culture.” Caitlin told me that “as the ‘Heart of the Home’, it is a privilege to dramatically impact culture by forming the next generation.”

By Sarah Holliday, Patriot Post – Since the 2017-2018 school year, the number of parents homeschooling has increased dramatically. With the rise has come pushback from state educators like Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray who said parents don’t have “any understanding of education.”… In my view, homeschooling is not an easy choice, but it is often far more rewarding. This isn’t coming from the perspective of a biased parent, but from a biased child who has experienced both homeschool and public school.

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – Porn is not freedom, and it’s not sexual liberation. It is an exploitative business that preys on the weak and vulnerable. The industry is rife with sex trafficking. It targets not only adults but increasingly children as well. This exploitation problem has been expedited with the advent of the Internet and the lack of tools parents have to protect their children from exposure to pornographic content or sex traffickers online.

By Virginia Allen, Kristen Eichamer, Daily Signal – The spike in homeschooling was understandable during the COVID-19 pandemic. With many public schools closed in 2020 and 2021, what other choice did parents have?… But even with schools open again, the number of families opting to homeschool has remained stable… According to analysis from The Washington Post, the homeschooling trend has defied predictions.

By Randy Hain, Integrated Catholic Life – I feel like being a better parent is a wrestling match that never ends!  This subject often comes up in my daily prayers as I seek discernment and courage to do the right things.  The alternative to my daily struggle is to be apathetic – which will virtually guarantee my children, especially my youngest son, will grow up drifting without a good foundation of faith, values and a sense of what is truly important in life.  Kids are like clay looking to be formed and developed.  In our absence, those who only see our children as consumers or who seek to do them harm will step into the vacuum.

By Catholic Vote News Feed – America Media in 2022 launched “Outreach,” an “LGBTQ Catholic ministry” personally founded by Fr. James Martin, SJ. The organization has weighed in on a number of debates during its first year, often criticizing U.S. bishops and other Catholic leaders for their opposition to the LGBTQ movement… Outreach itself, meanwhile, has yet to face much scrutiny from a Catholic perspective. Here, CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project provides a closer look at the controversial organization.

By Brian Mark Weber, Patriot Post – Attorneys general from 33 states sued Facebook’s parent company for addicting children to its products and misleading the public about the potential harm… When social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter burst onto the scene, they found an enthusiastic audience among people of all ages… At the time, it all seemed so harmless.

By Ashley Sadler, LifeSiteNews – One of America’s most prominent faithful Catholic universities this year admitted its largest ever freshman class even while other colleges in the state have seen their numbers decline… Franciscan Univ. of Steubenville welcomed 772 freshmen, the largest cohort of new students the college has seen since its founding in 1946… John Herrmann, Franciscan’s vice president for enrollment management, told the outlet the college had “just purchased a hotel, and renovated it in about six weeks to make it into a dormitory-style residence hall” to accommodate the new growth.

By Tristan Justice, The Federalist – While American physical education programs demonstrably fail the nation’s K-12 students, Christian homeschoolers have found an alternative that’s proven far more effective. The result is that homeschooling is now a driving force behind one of the fastest-growing sports in America: Ninja Warrior.

By Andreas Wailzer, LifeSiteNews – A bishop from Kenya has spoken out against same-sex relations in response to Pope Francis’ suggestion that priests may decide to “bless” homosexual partners… During his homily at the ordination Mass of Consolata Missionaries in Nairobi on October 6, Bishop Hieronymus Joya said “The issue that very many people are propagating today is that men should marry men, that women should marry women and they are asking the Church to validate it.” 

By Garrett D. Johnson, Crisis Magazine – When it comes to the Church’s teachings on human sexuality, especially related to LGBTQ+ issues, the Church and those of us who follow her teachings are getting smacked around. The smacking is coming from outside and inside the Church—and with increasing intensity. While being Catholic has never been easy, I’d say that the difficulty has been ratcheted up over the last ten years. Truths that have stood firm for thousands of years, despite many not following them, are now ignored by most and seen as hateful and ignorant. …

By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, The Stream – “Globally, trafficking is a $150 billion industry,” according to Heritage Foundation scholar Emma Waters. “This is a massive problem that besets every country in the world, but particularly the United States. …” … Our southern border being so easy to get across, is one contributing factor, Waters said. Another is broken families. In fact, 86% of trafficked kids were at one time in foster care. A large problem is children not having their father to protect them …

By Carrie Gress, The Catholic Thing – I’d heard it so many times, I scarcely thought I needed to research it. The well-worn refrain said that feminism hadn’t always been bad. The first wave was good. I decided to go look for myself just to check the box and confirm that what I’d always heard was in fact true… Astonishingly, I discovered that all was not so rosy in feminism’s first wave.

By Samantha Koch, Patriot Post – The bigger issue, however, is that this young woman represents a generation of people who have normalized the idea of perpetual singlehood. They truly believe — or are trying to convince themselves — that serving their own desires and goals is really all they need in life. In this worldview, there is no value in pursuing a family life and engaging in this institution because “easy” has become far more of a worthy pursuit than the work of investing time and intention into other humans.

By Tierin-Rose Mandleburg, MRC TV – Fred, who’s last name has been withheld out of privacy, was diagnosed with ADHD with autistic traits at age four. When he turned 18, he visited a Planned Parenthood location where he was prescribed cross-sex hormones after just a thirty minute appointment… Despite his developmental issues, Fred also struggled with depression and anxiety and was even expelled from three different special-needs schools over behavior issues,

By Scarlen Valderaz, Patriot Post – A child’s primary teacher is the parent. The parent-teacher dynamic must be corrected. The parent is responsible for their child’s educational success, and the teacher is only a temporary partner… The lack of parental engagement has welcomed the state to attempt to fill in where it sees fit. This is why school districts adopt the whole-child approach and try to provide wraparound services.

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – Gallup recently released an analysis of past polls wherein it posed the question: What is the ideal family size? As it currently stands, 47% of Americans polled believe that one to two children is the ideal, while 45% believe that three or more children is the ideal. Only 2% of all respondents declared that zero children is the ideal. Whew! … Many Americans believe in big families. Now the next step is for couples to start creating their ideal families, one kiddo at a time.

By Fulton J. Sheen, Catholic Exchange – In the eyes of the Church, therefore, marriage is a permanent union patterned upon the abiding love of Christ for His Church, and not a terminable pact of selfish passion that endures only as long as the passion endures. By upholding such an ideal, by asking such a guarantee, and by teaching the sacredness of a vow, the Church makes marriage serious. She practically tells the young couple the same thing the sign over the cashier’s desk tells the customer: “Count your change. No mistakes rectified after leaving the window.”

By Tyler Arnold, Catholic World Report – California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed legislation that would reduce funding to schools that restrict LGBT content from their classrooms… The new law, which took effect immediately upon the governor’s signature, grants the state superintendent the authority to reduce a school’s funding if it does not provide “sufficient textbooks or instructional materials” in line with the state’s standards for diversity and inclusion, which includes books available in the school’s library.

By Tom Ciesielka, LifeSiteNews – A recent survey ranked the public’s idea of the biggest risks to humanity, listing asteroid strikes, nuclear war, and a super volcano. But the pro-life group Human Life International (HLI) looks at global population statistics and asserts instead that the contraceptive mentality is the biggest threat to the survival of the human race… On September 26, World Contraception Day, HLI looks at the damage contraception has caused to humanity.

By Tierin-Rose Mandelburg, MRCTV – Ah great! Another teacher looking to indoctrinate kids!… Professor Katie Edwards from the Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln created a program for students who are struggling with gender confusion or homosexual inclinations to be matched with adults who suffer from the same delusions as part of a “mentorship” program… she created to pair up gay teens with gay adults for online mentoring sessions using $203,050 from the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health.

By Auguste Meyrat, The Catholic Thing – It’s no secret that men in the 21st century are going through a collective crisis. Fewer of them attend college, work a job, or marry and have kids; far more of them commit suicide, abuse drugs, watch porn, and break laws. For decades now, women have increasingly eclipsed men in various areas of achievement, and the many waves of feminism have gradually eroded the defining traits of masculinity… In his book Manhood, Senator Josh Hawley attempts to address this problem head-on and to offer a way through the stigmas and confusion obscuring true masculinity.

The Ruth Institute – “The Ruth Institute thanks Virginia’s Gov. Glenn Youngkin for righting a terrible injustice by pardoning a father whose only crime was standing up for his child”… Scott Smith was convicted of disorderly conduct for protesting at an August 2021 Loudoun County School Board meeting. He was outraged by his ninth-grade daughter’s sexual assault in a girl’s restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. The administration did its best to cover up the crime by not reporting the incident and transferring the perpetrator to another school.

By Msgr. Charles Pope, EWTN New – We recently observed the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist. While we can always look to the glory of his martyrdom, which is intrinsic and rooted in God’s unchanging judgment and will, I sensed a kind of irony in our praise of St. John that reflects poorly on the state of the Church today.

By Bishop Joseph Strickland, Diocese of Tyler, Texas, September 19, 2023 – I am pleased to offer another letter for your reflection. This letter addresses the beauty of the Sacraments of Matrimony and Holy Orders. They are both Sacraments of Vocation and essential to the life of the Church.

By Nick Kangadis, MRC TV – It seems that the number of sick people teaching — I mean grooming — young students in school is increasing. And much like politicians, they also look for loopholes to circumvent the law and institute their agendas into the lexicon, or in this case, the curriculum… A non-profit group called HiTOPS has been infiltrating schools in New Jersey — and virtually in states across the country — to inform children as young as second graders about the LGTBQ lifestyle and influence them to make decisions that they might not otherwise have made.

By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Attorney Mary Rice Hasson is the Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C… (says) “Human nature is denied by our culture, and specifically by gender ideology. It’s like, if there is no Designer, there is no design. And if there is no Creator, there is no natural order to things. And therefore, we can do what we want,” Mary says… “What science can tell us about the human being is, we know we are male and female. There are only two sexes, and you can’t change sex … There’s no third sex. …”

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – Parents and schools are being forced to acquiesce to the “transing” of kids through the strong arm of state law… California, the most radical of all the blue states, has set yet another horrible precedent for the rest of the country. What has been going on in that state is a pitched battle between parental rights and the faux rights of schools and teachers to hide gender transitions or sexual identities of students from their parents.

By Peter LaBarbera, World Net Daily – ‘Butchered’ by trans ‘medicine,’ she says true violence is ‘my own life experiences’… As if Americans needed any more evidence of the heavy hand and left-wing bias of Big Tech social media corporations, Instagram Saturday restricted the account of Chloe Cole, the world’s most famous young “detransitioner,” reportedly claiming her bio “encourages violence.”

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – “As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.”… Pope St. John Paul II famously spoke these words in a 1986 homily, delivered in Perth, Australia. This prophetic sentence is often quoted by Catholic pro-family activists. However, it is only one sentence in a longer homily, dedicated to a strong, unapologetic defense of the Church’s teaching on life and family.

By Francesca Pollio Fenton, CNA – A new curriculum is helping Catholic parents rediscover their role as the primary educators of their children. The Theology of the Body (TOB) Parent School equips parents to teach their children what is good and true about human sexuality at an age-appropriate pace… “theology of the body,” a body of teaching about what it means to be male and female. …

By Julian Kwasniewski, Crisis Magazine – Immodesty is unfair, unhelpful, and wounding to both men and women… modesty is about not sharing with certain people what shouldn’t be shared with them: namely, the intimacy of the body, even on a visual level. Because the exclusive sharing of personhood that the exposed body entails cannot occur except in marriage, the “inner chamber cannot be left open as a public playground” (as my dad puts it).

By Carl R. Trueman,, First Things – The clergy’s shift on this issue might well be motivated by pastoral intuitions to affirm people. It is a caring vocation and few, one hopes, enter it with a view to hurting others. Kindness is the order of the day… One reason for this is that gay marriage does not simply involve a minor expansion of the traditional concept… It is now clear that gay marriage did not merely expand the set of those considered to be married, but fundamentally evacuated marriage of meaning ….

By Michael Brown, The Stream – I’m going to omit a few words from the opening sentence of an article posted by the UK’s Christian Voice in order to drill home a point. The first sentence reads, “Parents in Hull have withdrawn their … daughter from … school over inappropriate content in Relationships and Sex Education.” And what, exactly, did these parents find “inappropriate”?… The next paragraph explains, “The decision follows their discovery that the school was using a book entitled ‘Grandad’s Pride.’

By Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, The Federalist – As a new school year kicks into gear, a Biden-appointed federal judge is using the legal equivalent of grade inflation to prop up the misguided efforts of a local school board to indoctrinate students with gender ideology. On Aug. 24, the U.S. District Court judge denied a requested injunction from a group of Muslim, Catholic, and Orthodox parents to opt their children out of LGBT storybook lessons, exposing the judge’s grave misunderstanding of the Supreme Court’s religious freedom jurisprudence.

By The Children’s’ Health Defense – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry on Tuesday filed an amicus brief in support of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) groundbreaking lawsuit against the legacy news media members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI)… The lawsuit, filed May 31, alleges the TNI violated antitrust laws and the U.S. Constitution by colluding with tech giants, some of which also are members of the TNI, to censor online news.

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine – In this land we live in now, people are so dis-integrated that they have often no love for the bodies God gave them but, instead, must have them mutilated, just as their families so often have been… And these have done the work of true progress, which is to turn back from error, to hold fast to the truth, and to delve into that truth more and more deeply, appreciating more fully the great gift of sexual being, male and female …

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Indeed, as told in the Gospels, it is not Christ Who is the driving force behind this great sign. It is His Mother, who comes to Him with her appeal: “They have no wine.”… Christ immediately understands what it is that His Mother is asking of Him, and yet does not seem inclined to do anything about it. “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come,” He replies. And yet, Mary is not to be put off. “Do whatever he tells you to do,” she tells the servants.

By Peter Pinedo, CNA – A federal court on Monday upheld an Alabama law banning hormonal sex-change treatments for children under 18. The court’s decision places Alabama among the 14 states to have laws banning sex-changing treatments for children in effect… The decision, which was made by a three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit, only temporarily upholds the ban. The lawsuit against Alabama’s transgender treatments law will continue and be reviewed by the full 11th Circuit Court, with a trial set for April 2, 2024.

Author Don Schwager, Servants of the Word – Matthew 19:23-30 – And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this they were greatly astonished, saying, “Who then can be saved?” ….

By Francisco Zuniga, Crisis Magazine – On August 9, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Muslim parents took the school board of Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland to court over its refusal to allow parents to have their children opt out of participation in an LGBTQ+ book curriculum. The curriculum relies on a policy that allows teachers to introduce, read, and discuss books about homosexuality and transgenderism in their classrooms without parents’ knowledge or consent.

By William Kilpatrick, Crisis Magazine – The hottest, new, jump-on-the-bandwagon idea in medicine, psychology, and education is “transitioning.” The theory behind the trans movement, however, is based on the work of a fraud… Take the case of Johnson Varkey, a biology professor at St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, Texas. He was recently dismissed from his position after four students complained that he taught that sex is determined by chromosomes—something that Varkey had taught for 20 years.

By Craig Bannister, CNSNews – On Wednesday, Target released proof of something that should have been obvious: offending the vast majority of customers doesn’t pay off. And, you can’t say they weren’t warned… The results reported in Target’s latest quarterly report reflect the damaging effects of the company’s scandalous, lewd, child-grooming LGBTQ products and promotions that promoted customer boycotts and backlash ….

By Ryan and Mary Rose Verret, The Witness to Love Team & the Board of Witness to Love – Why write a book for families on missionary discipleship? There were books on every topic imaginable but there were zero practical books available on missionary discipleship written by families for families. Books that any couple could pick up and say, “This book is for me! This will help us to better understand that our marriage is a gift to the Church and to our community. ….

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – I have warned in recent years that the euphemism that refers to the porn industry as the “adult entertainment industry” is dangerously wrong. Study after study has revealed that children are not only being exposed to pornography at younger and younger ages, but that a shocking percentage of underage teens use pornography on a regular basis.

By Samantha Stephenson, Public Discourse – What the sexual revolution began by upsetting gender roles and obscuring the necessary link between marriage and procreation, the reproductive revolution continues, shattering our conceptions of motherhood and fatherhood and severing the bond between parents and children… Hailed as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2021, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Elon Musk has revolutionized the way we do business. Yet as the father of ten children with three different mothers via multiple different means (including IVF and surrogacy), Musk is also revolutionizing the way we build families.

By Peter J. Leithart, First Things – Pearcey’s controlling framework is a contrast between two ideals of masculinity, the “Good Man” versus the “Real Man.” Good Men are characterized by honor, duty, integrity, and a willingness to sacrifice. They’re responsible and generous, and they provide and protect, especially the weak. Real Men are tough, strong, aggressive, highly competitive, unwilling to show weakness, unemotional, imposing, isolated, and self-made. …

By W. Bradford Wilcox, David Bass, Institute for Family Studies – Americans who are married with children are now leading happier and more prosperous lives, on average, than men and women who are single and childless… Is that statement surprising? In an age that prizes individualism, workism, and a host of other self-centric “isms” above marriage and family, it may well be. But the reality is that nothing currently predicts happiness in life better than a good marriage.

By Virginia Allen, Daily Signal – I think when you get to the 1900s, the dynamic changes significantly because then you’re venturing into communism. You’re also venturing into the influence of Nietzsche and existentialism and all of these long names that I think blur people’s eyes over… But I think that it fundamentally changed because feminism started pairing itself easily with communism. Communism was worried about restructuring society and ending monogamy and the nuclear family, and they were atheists. So there was really just one piece, this occult piece, this atheist and occult piece that were different between the two movements.

By Baylie McClafferty, Patriot Post – Dr. Blaire Peters, a “gender-affirming” surgeon, admitted that doctors in this field are just learning as they go. “We’ve maybe done a handful of pubertally suppressed adolescents as a field, and no one has published on it yet.” He went on to describe the challenges of creating a vaginal canal for a child without enough tissue to do so yet, and how they often pull lining from the child’s abdomen to track their genital canal. Chairman Mike Johnson (R-La.), facilitator of this hearing, responded to Dr. Peters statements by calling his practice “barbarism,” the mutilation of children.

By Katie Yoder, Our Sunday Visitor – When Emily Frase describes her experience with NFP, she points first to the cross… “We have to have the courage to be like, ‘You know what? Sometimes it is gruesome. Sometimes it really does look like a crucifixion — and that’s okay,’” the 33-year-old pres. of FAbM Base, a nonprofit dedicated to fertility awareness, told OSV… Frase and FAbM Base Exec. Dir. Mary Bruno, 37, shared their experiences with NFP during National NFP Awareness Week. The week takes place around the anniversary of Pope St. Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which warns against the dangers of contraception.

By Kate Moreland, Crisis Magazine – Once again, National NFP Awareness Week is here, and our feeds will all be bombarded by the joys, hardships, medical benefits, and new technologies available to aid our journeys with Natural Family Planning (NFP). At the risk of stepping on a few internet toes, I would like to posit that NFP is a valuable tool, especially for those seeking medical help, but not one for general use in orchestrating family size and structure. NFP is Not For Planning.

By Monica Seeley, Catholic World Report – As a newlywed, Julia Ibarra was more than a little nervous about using Natural Family Planning. She had grown up non-Catholic, with the assumption that the Pill would be part of her married life. Stepping away from that place felt insecure and raised a host of questions for her… Increasing her anxiety, there seemed to be remarkably few resources for newly married couples to learn about NFP. The sparse page of information the couple was given in a Catholic marriage prep course sparked Ibarra’s curiosity but offered little else.

By Emma Waters, The Stream – Kara was 11 when her family first sold her body for drugs… Sydney was 14 when she met an older man online who promised her financial security and a better life… And after another stint in the foster care system, Marcus decided that anything, including homelessness, would be better than the foster family he was living with… Each of these stories, from real girls and boys in the US, reflects the most common entry points for children being pulled into child trafficking.

By Hannah Hiester, Catholic Vote – A K-12 education consultant and public speaker recently exposed numerous resources provided for teachers to groom their students into the LGBTQ+ agenda… Deb Fillman, an advocate for keeping the government out of schools and an education consultant, exposed the “resources” in a Twitter thread… The resources included guides such as “Creating Safer Spaces for LGBTQ Youth: a Toolkit for Education, Healthcare, and Community-Based Organizations,” as well as “Queer & Now Pride Month Toolkit.”

By Joseph Summers, LifeSiteNews – The Louisiana legislature overturned the state governor’s veto of a bill that bans puberty blockers, hormones, and “sex change” surgeries for minors… In a one-day veto session on Tuesday, the Louisiana House voted 75-23 and the Senate 28-11 to overturn Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ veto of H.B. 648, dubbed the “Stop Harming Our Kids” Act… According to the bill, minors cannot access so-called “gender affirming” interventions, such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “sex change” surgeries.

The Ruth Institute, The Stream – “Officials of the Biden administration must stay up nights thinking of new and exotic ways to push the agenda of the Sexual Revolution,” said Ruth Institute President Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. “The latest example is ‘guidance’ from the Centers for Disease Control on how men can breastfeed – or ‘chestfeed,’ as activists prefer.”

By Christopher Wolfe, Crisis Magazine – The public conversation—if it can be called that—over abortion rose to hysterical heights with the demise of Roe v. Wade, and it has become central to national politics, especially on the left. But the conversation always stops short at a certain point. I want to review how the discussion proceeds and then show where it stops—where the ultimate underlying assumptions should reveal themselves.

By Shane Idleman, The Stream – Now is the time for repentance. Now is the time to experience forgiveness. Don’t let past failures make you think you’ve caused irreparable damage. Don’t lose heart. You will be amazed at what God will do with humility, brokenness, and repentance… Even in this chaos, God is still the King. He can reposition your heart back into alignment with His: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5). So take this opportunity now to turn to him, completely, unconditionally, and without delay. And learn again to weep, to intercede, to pray.

By Danielle Heckenkamp, Catholic Exchange – In an attempt to justify laziness with common causality, modern society has deviated from a place of order and ordinary decency to an uninterrupted abuse of noise, isolation, and immoral behaviors in the name of mercenary realism. Society once viewed decency standards, both moral and societal, essential to the continuous flow for an upright and structured civilization. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the standards of common decency changed …

By Dr. Steve LaTulippe, America Out Loud – Does Defense Sec. Austin really believe funding gender-transition surgeries for military members is a “force multiplier?” If so, the man needs a thorough psychiatric evaluation… This should tell us something. Just look at the combined actions of every government agency, from HHS to DHS, and you can only conclude that America is under siege by its own government.

By Wes and Cari Clark, American Spectator – As the times change, so will Disney’s Amerika. History, after all, is both subjective and fluid. It is also essential for every attraction at Disney’s Amerika to be non-controversial. Disney’s Amerika plans to be on the cutting edge of every new political and historical idea, realizing that the facts are no longer either commonly known by the general public, or even relevant. All attractions are designed to keep that all-important cash flow coming! And if it goes the way of EuroDisney–who cares? This time we’ve stuck the taxpayers with the bill!

By Tom Gilson, The Stream – My heart almost stopped. I’d never felt anything like it, never even imagined it… My wife and I were away for almost two weeks in June and July, visiting our grandchildren and of course their parents and other family members, hundreds of miles from our Ohio home. Our granddaughter was just six weeks old, barely over 8 pounds. She was sleeping in the crook of my arm. It was the first time I’d held her.

By Kiri Jorgensen, The Federalist – We now find ourselves in a battle for the minds of our children within the walls of our own homes. This is a battle we cannot lose… The children’s book publishing industry… believes it should have the power to control your children’s minds. And it’s progressively gained that access… Authors must include instant positive acceptance of any woke social agenda portrayed in their stories. If they don’t include this, they won’t get published by medium and large houses.

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – “Those who think freedom is worth preserving should be concerned about the health of the family” ( Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D)… “A free society needs the family. Specifically, we need mothers and fathers to help their children grow up to have a conscience and the ability to control themselves… “Love and Economics” was published in 2001 to critical acclaim among social conservatives and religious believers. Fr. James Schall, long-time professor of government at Georgetown University ….

By Micaiah Bilger, LifeNews -An Iowa Republican lawmaker urged couples Tuesday to practice abstinence instead of relying on aborting their unborn babies if they do not want children… State Rep. Brad Sherman, R-Williamsburg, drew criticism for making the comment as Iowa House lawmakers debated a heartbeat bill… The pro-life legislation, which passed later in the day, protects unborn babies by banning elective abortions once their heartbeat is detectable, about six weeks of pregnancy.

By Teresa Hodgins, Catholic Exchange – It should be clear to all who live today that this is not a simple issue for many people—and neither does the Church see it as entirely simple. For this reason, recent popes have spent ample time teaching both the reasons why the Church believes this and how we can respond to human life and sexuality in a way that is beneficial for both women and children.

By Darrick Taylor, Crisis Magazine – Social and cultural conservatives especially need to recognize that, despite this setback, the Left has many avenues by which it can continue to impose its agenda on the country… This is true above all with regard to the most damaging part of that agenda: the Sexual Revolution.

By Greg Cook, Catholic Exchange – Treasuring the Goods of Marriage in a Throwaway Society, with its thoughtful and challenging content, its useful list of references and resources, and its accessible but not dumbed-down style, is a wonderful addition to the library of must-have Catholic books on marriage. (Like, for instance, Fulton Sheen’s Three to Get Married.) It would be valuable for marriage prep, newlyweds, or those long-married, as well as priests and seminarians to help in their formation as pastors.

By Tierin-Rose Mandleburg, MRCTV – …roughly 6,000 communities in the United Methodist Church are splitting away from over discrepancies over LGBTQ issues… many churches are affirming unbiblical and delusional senses of reality and identity and real Christians are getting fed up!… As most know, gay marriage is against the teachings of the Bible. The Lord’s word directs that marriage is to be a covenant between a man and a woman. With the exponential rise in everything LGBTQ, many individuals are recognizing that they’d rather to follow a woke mob instead of the most ultimate power, God.

By Peter Pinedo, CNA – “Sound of Freedom,” a film (exposing) human-trafficking made by Catholic filmmakers Eduardo Verastegui and Alejandro Monteverde, had a massively successful opening day in which it reached number one at the box office, beating out Disney’s fifth “Indiana Jones” installment… Speaking with EWTN News Nightly’s Tracy Sabol in a June 30 interview, Verastegui, who produced and acted in Sound of Freedom, said the purpose of the film was to raise awareness about the 2 million children exploited every year in the international sex-trafficking trade.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Something extremely interesting is happening with regard to gender ideology right now… In the U.S., we are seeing several states passing bans on such things as puberty blockers or body-mutilating surgery for children… these efforts have been met with ferocious denunciations by LGBT activists, the federal government, and major medical organizations… President Biden has condemned such common-sense laws as “immoral,” decrying the “hysterical” and “prejudiced” politicians passing those laws. ….

By Sheryl Collmer, Crisis Magazine – Human trafficking supplies three markets: sex, labor, and organs. The youngest victims are sold into the sex trade, where a premium is paid for youth. When kids age past puberty and command a lesser price, they can be used as slave labor in illegal drug production, mining for dangerous elements like lithium, and other work that people would not do without coercion. Eventually—and slaves don’t have long lives—the organs of those who have no say in their own fate are sold. It’s the economy of the damned.

By Wendell Hull, Crisis Magazine – Fathers pass on to their children a part of them different than mothers. We did not bear our children. Instead, we watched the process of in utero growth and birth from afar. From there, we live with, in, and through our children as they mature into adulthood and independence. We do not nurse them or salve their wounds like their mothers. We give advice, impart knowledge and skills, jest, and wrestle with them. We also discipline and lead them in right ways. If we fail, or if the vagaries of life take our children, the loss adds to our pain the insult of a trenchant sense of failure.

By Andrew Petiprin, Catholic World Report – Both truth and charity demand at this point that we face up to the connection between the LGBTQ movement and the forces of darkness… St. Paul tells us, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12)… The time for valor in this struggle has only just begun.

By Patriot Post – Bud Light, Target, and others have been in the news for doing what has become standard practice, especially in June: shoving the rainbow down our throats no matter what we want to buy. Obviously, that offends millions of Christians, but we can’t boycott every company with a rainbow flag in the window. The Family Research Council’s Sarah Holliday explores what that might mean… As businesses like Target sell apparel for children with Satanist ties and Bud Light advocates transgenderism, believers naturally start to wonder: “Is it wrong for Christians to shop at stores run by sinners?”

By Dr. Steve LaTulippe, America Out Loud Truth – I’ve always had a preference to elevate Mother’s Day above the “other half,” but this year might be an exception to my rule. Fathers are important. A virtuous male parent who follows God’s design for marriage and parenting is the strength of the family, and the assurance of a strong nation. We must never allow Hollywood and worldly rulers to profane what God himself has ordained fathers to be… a father is the bulwark that shields and protects the family from all harm. Fulfilling these roles takes wisdom from above.

By Stephen Kokx, LifeSiteNews – Twitter owner Elon Musk has encouraged Angel Studios to stream Sound of Freedom, its upcoming movie about child trafficking starring Jim Caviezel, on the platform… “I recommend putting it on this platform for free for a brief period or just asking people to subscribe to support (we would not keep any funds)” … During an interview with Steve Bannon last month, Caviezel cryptically remarked that the film essentially depicts real-life events. “Epstein Island isn’t the only island out there where they have … children,” he said.

By Sarah Parshall Perry, Daily Signal – In a June like none other, where the LGBTQ agenda has been crammed at increasing velocity down the throats of unwitting Americans, everyday folks are reaching their limits… With two more weeks to go in “Pride Month,” this is bad news for the rainbow mafia. But it’s a sign of character and courage that the rest of us can take hope in—especially when demonstrated by families in the direct line of propagandistic fire.

By John M. Grondelski, The Catholic Thing – The day that Calvin Coolidge succeeded Warren G. Harding as president his son, Calvin Jr., started work on a tobacco farm. Coolidge writes, “When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president, I would not work in a tobacco field.’ He replied, ‘If my father were your father, you would.’”… A father who thought a 16-year-old son should work and have a summer job was not unusual in 1923.

By Dr. Kevin Roberts, Delano Squires, The Federalist – Dads across America are receiving something this Father’s Day that we have never sought but desperately deserve: vindication… The social engineers who have shaped the past 60 years of American social policy assumed a check from the government is an adequate replacement for a man in the home. Worse, a new generation of radical elites has spent the past decade trying to destroy the sex binary altogether… But the evidence is clear: Father absence is associated with higher rates of poverty, teen pregnancy, youth crime, and substance abuse.

By Randy Hain, Integrated Catholic Life – What sort of rules or maxims might this Catholic father, who has his act together, follow to stay on the right path? If we consider what Scripture and the Church teach us, we can look to these four points as our guide… 1. Our vocation is to get our families to heaven… 2. Our children are always watching us. They will likely model later in life what they learn at home… 3. We are made for heaven, not this world. Let’s act accordingly. …

By Brian Mark, Patriot Post – …the so-called progressive Left has done everything to scare parents away from alternative methods of educating their children. Indeed, for decades they’ve claimed that homeschooling is steeped in racism and child abuse… Leftists fail to address why parents are pulling their kids out of public schools “because the fruits of the poisonous tree would lead back to these same failed leftist education policies,” as our own Emmy Griffin wrote last year. “More and more parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children on the altar of the leftist agenda.”

By Ashley Sadler, LifeSiteNews – Unelected bureaucrats in the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and other global organizations have spent decades promoting radical feminism worldwide to the detriment of traditional social and religious societies and the family itself, retired English professor Janice Fiamengo explained in a comprehensive report… The global inculcation of feminism has laid the groundwork for the current agenda to promote LGBT ideology worldwide.

By Sarah Parshall Perry, The Federalist – In a June like none other, where the LGBTQ agenda has been crammed at increasing velocity down the throats of unwitting Americans, everyday folks are reaching their limits… With two more weeks to go in “Pride Month,” this is bad news for the rainbow mafia. But it’s a sign of character and courage that the rest of us can take hope in—especially when demonstrated by families in the direct line of propagandistic fire.

By Eddie Scarry, The Federalist – A friend of mine took her two young children — a boy, 6, and a girl, 4 — to the Indianapolis Public Library… (they brought home) “Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too”, a colorful picture book by Michelle Tea, the creator of “drag queen story hour.”… The story involves two young kids who like to play dress up, but when they’re told to take the costumes off before leaving the house, a garish drag queen named Morgana arrives and tells them all about the splendor of being a transvestite.

By John Grondelski, EWTN News – The distinctive note of Charles Péguy’s poetry is that he often writes it as if the speaker is God. In his poem “Freedom,” God the Father reflects on the balancing act vis-à-vis his children that freedom poses on him. Freedom requires his child to take risks to stand on his own two feet but, like any good parent, God wants to protect his child. It’s like the dilemma, he says, of a father teaching his son how to swim: when do you hold him up, when do you let go? …

By Miriam Grossman, MD, Do No Harm Staff – Dr. Grossman testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health. She made clear from the start that this debate desperately needs an infusion of reality, not more radical activism: “I’m here today to provide you with facts you haven’t heard. You haven’t heard them because when it comes to youth gender dysphoria (also called ‘transgenderism’), the public and most importantly parents, are, I am sad to say, consistently fed misinformation.”

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Well, June is here. It’s pretty hard to miss. Most everywhere we look, we are inundated (more so than usual) with rainbows and other symbols of “Pride.” These Pride events display cultural grooming at its finest… Many of us are filled with anger and frustration at the left’s agenda being thrown in our and our children’s faces so blatantly and aggressively… we cannot sit back and act as if none of this is our problem… It is our problem. We all have to do our part to resist Pride (the sin and the movement) and reclaim the rainbow by speaking the truth in love.

By Anonymous, The Federalist – The mere thought of bringing a new life into this messy situation at my age was more than I could bear — or so I thought… If someone had told me just four short years ago that my life would be marked by more blessings than I could count, I would have looked at them with complete incredulity. I never dreamed I could be surrounded by the warm love and happiness I experience today… It was all made possible by my unexpected pregnancy and a community that empowered me to take on the mission of motherhood.

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – I don’t need to tell you that our culture is hopelessly confused about everything having to do with sex and gender. As conservative commentator Matt Walsh showed powerfully in his documentary that went viral on Twitter recently, there are a growing number of people who can’t answer as simple a question as, “What is a woman?”… But it’s not just womanhood that we are confused about. Our culture is riven by debates and competing messages about the nature of “real” manhood and “real” fatherhood.

Catholic Vote News Feed – Will Fr. James Martin Succeed?.. In an essay.. Fr. James Martin wrote that things are “getting better” for “LGBTQ Catholics.”… Martin claimed that Pope Francis is among the prelates who give him hope that the Church will embrace the LGBTQ movement… “[A] number of cardinals, archbishops and bishops have called for the church to reconsider terming homosexual acts as ‘intrinsically disordered’ in the Catechism, which LGBTQ people often say is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to feeling welcome in their church.”

By Nancy Flory, The Stream – Actor Jim Caviezel said Sound of Freedom was the most important movie he has done since Passion of the Christ. Based on the true story of Tim Ballard, a former government agent who quit his job to rescue children from human trafficking and sex slavery, Sound of Freedom tells the story without needlessly exposing the viewer to gruesome details… To be sure, the Angel Studios film deals with a heavy subject and is not for the faint of heart. Nor small children. ….

By Evita Duffy-Alfonso, The Federalist – In an Instagram post.. Green Beret combat veteran and dad of three Nick Freitas shared with his followers a 2017 WRTV Indianapolis interview with Jack Reynolds, a pedophile who targeted children in the 1980s and spent 12 years in prison for it… Reynolds was asked what “characteristics” he “looked for in children before molesting them.” Reynolds responded by saying it was a child’s family that mattered more than the actual child. “If I thought the father was a threat, I would not approach the child..”

By Patrick Delaney, LifeSiteNews – The taboos were organic. They derive from collective experience and instinct, the two most reliable guides to life. They evolved for a reason. They still do. Our job at this point is to protect them, despite the hectoring, the nonstop hectoring from the people in charge. You know the outlines of right and wrong. You’re born knowing them. So don’t let them talk you out of what you can smell. Don’t let them rationalize away your intuitive moral sense. Cling to your taboos like your life depends on them because it does. Cherish and protect them like family heirlooms. That’s exactly what they are.

By Matthew A. Tsakanikas, Crisis Magazine – At the request of Pope Francis, the head of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life announced that he was working on a document for the divorced who are living in attempted new marriages. On April 22, Cardinal Farrell promised the text would be for those “having a failed marriage behind them, and living in new unions.”.. A marriage “behind them”? …

By Sarah Merly, MRC TV – Florida’s Moms for Liberty (MFL) stands among the newly–and wrongly–defamed groups (by SPLC). The MFL website states that the organization “is dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”… “I think that Moms for Liberty tactics are definitely hateful,” said SPLC research analyst Maya Henson-Carey. “I think their overarching theme of calling for the abolition of the Dept. of Ed., attacking public schools specifically, and attacking public teachers for indoctrinating students with the radical Marxist agenda.

By Jack Devine, Patriot Post – Watch out for the “T” in LGBTQ, which is causing an awful lot of trouble… Transgenderism is madness, at every level: 1.) It’s false. The entire transgender premise — the notion that one’s gender is a matter of personal choice and not biology — is fiction. Redefining the term “gender” as a state of mind rather than an unalterable physical characteristic does not alter the reality that our human species is sexually binary; that male is male, and female is female …

By Jeff Gardner, The Stream – Lately, stories have been making the rounds featuring angry parents confronting school boards over explicit, sexual material in schools. The material flagged by these parents is often so graphic that school board members refuse to look at it or hear it read aloud… While we should be concerned about the “worst of the worst” of sexualizing material in our schools, a significant body of data indicates that any sex education in school does more harm than good to our children.

By Bridget McCartney Nohara, EWTN News – As a lifelong lover of home design and the essence of “home” itself, stumbling upon “Feels Like Home” by Lauren Liess a few weeks ago at my local library simply made sense… Taking the book from the shelf, I quickly lost myself in the tranquil image on the cover… I flipped through a few pages, discerning if it was worth checking out… much to my surprise, I spotted the Blessed Mother prominently, albeit humbly, on a living room mantle. This was unusual for a secular home-design book.

By Craig Bannister, CNSNews – Across the board, majorities of American adults reject gender ideology, when it comes to the number of genders, school indoctrination without parental consent, and transgender surgery and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for minors, a new Rasmussen survey reveals… Self-identified Democrats are the least likely to oppose gender ideology, according to the survey of 1,116 U.S. adults, conducted May 24-25, 2023. ..

By Eric Sammons, Crisis Magazine – As Pride Month kicks off, the pressing concern of faithful Catholics is the political aspects of LGBTQ+ activism, and understandably so. After all, the Alphabet Mafia is explicitly advocating the corruption and even mutilation of children, as well as the crushing of freedom in our land—you MUST wear the Rainbow! The honoring of the blasphemous anti-Catholic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is just a symptom of the diabolical disease that has infected our culture.

By Craig Bannister, MRC TV – Across the board, majorities of American adults reject gender ideology, when it comes to the number of genders, school indoctrination without parental consent, and transgender surgery and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for minors, a new Rasmussen survey reveals… Self-identified Democrats are the least likely to oppose gender ideology, according to the survey of 1,116 U.S. adults, conducted May 24-25, 2023.

By Jean Mondoro, LifeSiteNews – Twitter executives hid the film from the feeds of Daily Wire followers and removed the ability to simply re-tweet posts in which the movie was embedded. Musk responded to the situation amid the chaos, posting that the move to suppress “What Is A Woman?” was “a mistake.”… all restrictions were lifted, and the documentary was allowed to be shared freely on the platform… Musk.. went a step further by actively promoting the movie on his Twitter profile, an act that Catholic podcast host and documentary creator Matt Walsh celebrated as “a huge win.”

By Timothy Furnish, The Stream – Last week, conservative commentator Steve Deace’s Twitter feed was discussing which The Lord of the Rings character fit Donald Trump. This reminded me I’d done such an analysis of the 2012 Presidential candidates. Thus why not for those of 2024? After all, Tolkien’s writings can and have been applied to geopolitics. And writers, both Left and Right, have been typecasting politicians as Shakespeare characters for years. …

By Sean Fitzpatrick, Crisis Magazine – Catholics should take a stand, therefore—a vocal yet charitable stand—against the Rainbow Flag. Lodge well-worded complaints. Write petitions. Change your shopping habits, even if just for the month of June. Pray in public. Conscientiously object. Adopt slogans of peaceful defiance. We have the numbers, and we should act in that confidence even if we don’t perceive our army…

By Francisco Zuniga, Crisis Magazine – Parents can use “movie night” with their kids to teach valuable lessons on how to live as Catholics… Friday night is movie night for my wife, my five daughters, and me. We select a film, bake a pizza, and sit around the dinner table to enjoy some time together after a long week of work and school… A few weeks ago, we were watching the second half of The Sound of Music. Since it is such a long film, we had decided to dedicate two sessions to it.

By Randy Hain, Integrated Catholic – Marriage is in trouble everywhere, especially in our country where over half of marriages end in divorce. Our culture, so influenced by Hollywood and materialism, has set about creating a society which no longer values marriage and the family, but instead favors one which glorifies selfishness, greed and offers false idols for us to worship instead of God. As an author and speaker, I attempt to reach people with Christ-inspired work which will help them lead authentic and integrated Catholic lives.

By Elise Temme, The Federalist – “Look, Mommy! A rainbow flag!”… My 4-year-old daughter excitedly pointed at a suburban front porch as we drove home from a luncheon with friends. I shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat and paused before responding to my precocious preschooler who has a penchant for princesses, unicorns, and rainbows… “Yes, that is,” I replied. “But we don’t support that rainbow flag.” I anticipated her follow-up question: “Why not?”

By Matt Lamb, Assoc. Editor, The College Fix – June represents a “a fundamental contrast between two cities,” Professor C.C. Pecknold wrote on Wednesday in The Postliberal Order. The St. Augustine scholar draws an analogy between June and one of the saint’s famous work titled “The City of God.”… The community formed by the embrace of the alphabet agenda “is vicious and tyrannical” which represents the “city of man.” This is seen in the flying of the rainbow flag outside the U.S. embassy in Vatican City.

By Simon Kent, Breitbart – Target is just one corporate entity to have fallen under continued criticism over the past several weeks due to its overt promotion of woke gender ideology and the LGBTQ agenda, despite the fact those who identify as such make up a small percentage of the U.S. population… Customers voted with their feet – and their wallets – and simply ignored the Target outlets across the country… (hence) Target’s shareholders subsequently lost $9 billion in stock market value …

By Casey Chalk, Catholic World Report – Consider the extreme emotivist argumentation from the secular, feminist left when it comes to abortion and transgenderism. Since last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the pro-choice camp has sounded the alarm regarding the threat posed by the pro-life movement to female autonomy. Implicit in those warnings is a presumption that a woman’s body is unique in its capacity to conceive and bear children… those same pro-choice voices also assert that biological men have the right to claim the identity of womanhood, even though such men have absolutely no ability to conceive or bear children.

By Martina Moyski, Church Militant – … “people with sexual attractions like pedophilia and nepiophilia would be protected from discrimination.”… Dr. Jennifer Morse, “Citizens, churches and businesses in Connecticut cannot prevent individuals with these sexual attractions from working or volunteering in schools, hospitals or businesses. So much for ‘safe environment’ training and background checks!”… “Discriminating against a known pedophile would be illegal under Connecticut’s new definitions.” …

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International – Few things provoke more righteous anger in me than the increasingly common sight of ideologically minded adults hyper-sexualizing children, whether for their own gratification, or in the cause of spreading the doctrines of the sexual revolution… One sees this perhaps most overtly in the growing “drag queen” movement, which has gone from being a phenomenon confined to seedy adult bars, to something that children are invited to participate and compete in.

By Amanda Prestigiacomo, DailyWire – “Our primary purpose in doing this is not to make them hurt financially, but to not participate in evil.”… Conservative consumers have finally figured out how to make their money talk when it comes to companies that peddle LGBT ideology including transgenderism, and Wall Street is taking notice.

By Nicholas Wylie, Church Militant – Another popular clothing brand is promoting the homosexual grooming of children and transgender ideology just in time for so-called Pride Month… On Wednesday, the apparel brand The North Face released a new ad featuring a gay drag queen named Pattie Gonia, who invites listeners to “come out.”… Conservative political activist Robby Starbuck tweeted, “Can anyone explain how the heck this ad helps @thenorthface sell outdoor clothes? They’re screaming at you to not buy their products if this violates your values. Accept their challenge.”

By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine – Buy a Sacred Heart flag and put it up in place of your American flag… The rainbow nonsense is not a grassroots thing. It is purely top-down, forced on us by the rich and powerful. Remember Chick-fil-A Day, when millions turned out to buy a sandwich in solidarity with the owner’s support of man-woman marriage? That was grassroots, and that is us. And it scared the rainbows half to death to know so many do not go along with their propaganda.

By Michael Brown, The Stream – I can’t wait to go a week or a month or — who could imagine? — a year without writing a single article on LGBTQ+ activism. I imagine you can’t wait to go a week or month or year without reading another article on the subject either. But here we are in 2023 in the midst of a cultural implosion, and common sense, decency, the fear of God, and a deep love for people cause me to cry out. Again.

By Stephen Kokx, LifeSiteNews – During an explosive interview with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon last week, Christian actor Jim Caviezel accused the global Deep State of colluding with the mainstream media to cover up its complicity in child trafficking… “Epstein Island isn’t the only island out there where they have … children,” he remarked on the War Room podcast last week. “I just started noticing that any time a story came out on trafficking – anything – it was gone the next day.”

By Joseph M. Eble, MD, Catholic World Report – Following the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a legal chasm opened that state legislators rushed to fill. Pro-life forces swiftly mobilized to introduce state legislation restricting abortion. If these efforts are to produce lasting success, they must be simultaneously paired with making adoption affordable and widely available… When a (usually single) woman becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she has three primary options: 1) parent the child herself; 2) have an abortion; or 3) make an adoption plan and give her child the gift of a family through adoption.

By John-Henry Westen, LifeSiteNews – Jason Jones believes America is still a “shining city on a hill” but that “the lights are off” thanks to its radically pro-LGBT Biden administration… “And … what makes matters even more sorrowful is that the rainbow flag has become really a flag of imperialism, of colonialism, of disrupting and undermining traditional cultures around the world, cultures that are already falling apart, countries that are already suffering famine and violence than the United States shows up flying this rainbow flag…”

The Ruth Institute, The Stream – Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse… “Something has gone badly wrong in America and in other countries across the west. I am locating its roots in the adoption of contraception from the 1960s onward.”… “A lot of people thought contraception would be a net win for humanity. People thought it would give women control over their fertility, that it would strengthen marriage, that it would reduce abortion. Instead, the exact opposite happened.”

By Alyssa Murphy, EWTN News – Many know Lisa Wheeler for her public-relations prowess, bringing Catholic journalists and radio hosts into close proximity with some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry who are working steadfastly to shed light on stories that inspire and uplift, all while embracing their Catholic faith and identity… Chances are, if you’ve read any interview with Mark Wahlberg, Jonathan Roumie, or are looking to talk to Jim Caviezel about his new film on human trafficking, The Sound of Freedom, Wheeler’s PR company, Carmel Communications, is the conduit.

By Tony Kinnett, Daily Signal – Warning: This report contains sexually graphic images from commonly available books in school libraries, which The Daily Signal has obscured in part… A bill that has passed the Texas House with bipartisan support could become the model for ensuring public school libraries don’t provide sexual content to children… HB 900, sponsored by four Republicans and a Democrat, specifies what “sexual content” is and prescribes actions by Texas public schools to ensure children aren’t given access ….

By Jennifer Roback Morse, EWTN News – The Catholic Church must abandon her ancient teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” in order to keep up with the most modern findings of science. But what if “science” says no such thing?… Before addressing this, let me point out an objective historical fact: The Catholic Church’s disapproval of homosexual acts was at one time the consensus of the entire Judeo-Christian tradition. The Church’s specific language that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” flows in part from her long dialogue with Greek philosophy and has a specific philosophical meaning. Homosexual acts are not “ordered” toward the proper end of sexual acts, namely reproduction.

By Micaiah Bilger, LifeNews – The Purvis, Mississippi mother has her hands full, but she told Good Morning America that she treasures every moment with her quintuplets after praying for a baby for years… “I know that a lot of people are probably like, ‘How are you doing this? How are you not going crazy?’ It’s because I’ve wanted to have a baby my entire life… “… They’re my biggest blessing that I have and so I don’t mind it. I don’t mind the chaos.”

By Rachel Watkins, Catholic Exchange – GRAVISSIMUM EDUCATIONIS, Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Christian Education, promulgated by Pope Paul VI and signed on Oct. 28, 1965, tells us parents are “bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators.”… “Parents are the ones who must create a family atmosphere animated by love and respect for God and man, in which the well-rounded personal and social education of children is fostered. Hence the family is the first school of the social virtues that every society needs.”

By Jerome German, Crisis Magazine – In a recent article, Philip Primeau wrote about the controversy surrounding comments made by Jewish commentator Dennis Prager concerning sexual sin. Prager’s view of sin is not the Christian view; that is to say that it tends toward a silo approach rather than a wholesome, integrated view of the human person. In Prager’s mind, the physical act, and only the physical act, is a sin, and thinking is not an act. Primeau deftly demonstrates that such a view is simply not supported by the Hebrew Scriptures.

By John M. Grondelski, Crisis Magazine – Honoring “Mother’s Day” means saying motherhood in and of itself is something good and valuable… That has not been the message of the past half century… Roe v. Wade taught Americans that the value and even acknowledgment of the fact of motherhood lies not in motherhood but in one’s attitude toward it. If one wants to be a mother, fine. But if one doesn’t, then babies become “blobs of tissue.”

By Brian Mark Weber, Patriot Post – The media have successfully convinced millions of Americans that protecting kids from being “gender-affirmed” is a threat to their health and well-being. Even worse, many states have enacted legislation to keep parents out of the discussion to media accolades… That’s how we know conservatives have completely lost the narrative to the gender-confusion cultists… as long as the Leftmedia control the flow of information, they’ll always have the upper hand.

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing – The sexual revolution… commenced in the early 1960s. At first, it seemed a naughty but relatively harmless thing. It was college boys and girls choosing to go to bed with one another while at the same time demanding that their elders, i.e., parents and college authorities, either approve or at least tolerate this breach of the rules of conventional (and Christian) morality… “What harm does it do society” ….

By Rafi Eis, First Things – Marriage is therefore a covenant, which emphasizes how the new unit grows together, not what each individual gets out of it. Spouses may have different sexual expectations, and sometimes circumstances interfere with intimacy, but the covenant of marriage requires loyalty and commitment regardless. Pornography destroys that covenantal commitment and feeds existing dissatisfaction with fantasies about what could or should have been. Ultimately, it ruins marriage. Purity of mind, in contrast, increases dedication and builds marriage.

By The Ruth Institute, The Stream – “The cultural narrative has kept this a quiet issue, a silent, very shameful issue,” (therapist Lisa Rowe, co-author of Unraveled Roots: Exposing the Hidden Causes of Damaging Behaviors, and CEO of Support After Abortion ) says. “What we’re hoping to do at Support After Abortion is break that. If we don’t begin to have this conversation with more compassion, people are going to stay silent. They’re going to stay suffering.”

By Emmy Griffin, Patriot Post – There is a terrifying logic to the leftist infiltration of our public schools. If they control the minds of children, they have their hooks in the future of the country. Aside from the multitude of evils that this is already producing (transgenderism, critical race theory, environmental cultists), kids are failing academically. This is particularly true in the arenas of history and civics… History and civics actually got the lowest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — i.e. the Nation’s Report Card …

By Kennedy Hall, Crisis Magazine – Recently, there was a vote at my local “Catholic” school board pertaining to what types of flags will be flown on board property. The vote was not technically about flying the rainbow flag, but it was, of course, all about flying that flag. On paper, the issue at hand was whether the board would allow flags other than the Canadian flag to be flown…right before “pride” season begins.

By Jack Devine, Patriot Post – Due to the embarrassing embrace of transgender ‘influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney.. (Anheuser-Busch stockholders) lost $6 billion in market cap in one day… Mulvaney is a 26-year-old man-turned-woman, a self-promoting and very successful TikTok and Instagram “transgender” personality… the (response to the) advertising blitz that featured Mulvaney in a bathtub drinking a Bud Light and nationwide distribution of commemorative cans of Bud Light with Mulvaney’s smiling picture on the front.. did not go well.