MADISON — On January 25, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual March for Life marking the 40th anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
St. Ambrose Academy juniors and seniors were among the throngs of pro-lifers. Several St. Ambrose marchers also were recent winners of the Knights of Columbus Respect for Life Contest at the diocesan and state levels.
REEDSBURG — Sacred Heart Parish in Reedsburg is offering a series of meetings called “Catholic Returning Home.”
MADISON — The Rite of Election of Catechumens and Call to Continuing Conversion for Candidates for Full Communion in the Catholic Church will be celebrated by the parishes of the Diocese of Madison on Sunday, Feb. 17, at 3 p.m. at St. John the Baptist Church in Waunakee.
Parishes from throughout the diocese will send those who will celebrate the sacraments of initiation this Easter, as well as their sponsors, family, and friends. About 800 people are expected to attend, with Bishop Robert C. Morlino presiding.
What are your plans for Lent this year? Here we are in the Year of Faith, a year that Pope Benedict XVI hopes will awaken humanity at a critical moment.
“In vast areas of the earth the faith risks being extinguished, like a flame without fuel,” the pope warned. “We are facing a profound crisis of faith, a loss of a religious sense which represents one of the greatest challenges for the Church today . . . The renewal of faith must, then, be a priority for the entire Church in our time.”
MADISON — Many students who attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison (including me) have fond memories of attending St. Paul’s University Catholic Center.
It has been a “home away from home” for thousands of Catholic students on the secular university campus since the early 1900s.
To the editor:
Tony Magliano’s reflections on Pope Benedict’s Day of Peace message in the January 10 Catholic Herald is relevant to this time and place. As noted by the pope, inequality has been increasing for decades as a result of selfish and individualistic deregulation of financial markets.
Deregulation caused the financial crisis of 2008 and recession. Millions lost their jobs, families lost their homes, and $16 trillion in household wealth evaporated. But since then, 93 percent of new wealth has accrued to the richest one percent.
A week later followed the economic column in the Catholic Herald by Anthony Esolen about some of Pope Leo XIII’s views on socialism in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. The pope denounced socialism because it deprives working people of the gains of their wages in the form of private property.
To the editor:
I want to thank the Catholic Herald for running the excellent article on Pope Leo XIII’s assessment of socialism as evil. It truly is.
Socialism, with its tempting allure of equality, has not produced equality, only poverty, repression, and death. Socialism has manifested itself worldwide in many forms and variants, but always with a similar end result of poverty and death.
Whether it was the millions killed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the genocide of Hitler’s German Socialist Workers Party, or the mass desert graveyards of Saddam Hussein’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party in Iraq, the result is always the same.
To the editor:
As a former student of Sandy Hook Elementary School who still lives in Sandy Hook today, I am saddened at the tragedy that occurred. It is devastating that so many innocent children’s lives were taken before they had their first day of middle school, their first day behind the wheel, their first time falling in love — so many firsts that these children will never experience.
On January 25, hundreds of thousands of people who have achieved these milestones were going to “March for Life” in Washington for another group of people who have not been given the opportunity to experience their most important first — their first breath.
To the editor:
In response to last week’s disturbing column by Stephen Kent and the need to change the Second Amendment, it should be pointed out that all of America’s problems — slavery, the relocation of Native Americans, prohibition, concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, undeclared wars, and Roe v. Wade — occurred when we ignored or “improved” the Constitution.
Even more curious is the Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement that guns are too easily accessible. Were it not for the Second Amendment, there would be no Catholic Herald, a Conference of Catholic Bishops, or even Catholics, for that matter, since we would long ago have been hunted down like rats, just like in the mother country of Merrie Olde England.
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What advice would America’s most renowned black man offer to America’s first black president? If he were alive today, what wisdom would the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., offer to President Barack Obama?
This question takes on added significance considering that this year the federal holiday honoring King, and Obama’s second public inauguration, fell on the same day — January 21.
