The Meddlesome Priest :

“A Christian who does not take the dimension of martyrdom seriously in life does not understand the road that Jesus has indicated,” the Pope said May 11, according to Vatican Radio's translation. ---Catholic News Agency, May 11, 2015 A friend and colleague, Matthew Bixby ( blogging @ WhyThink.net ) sent me an article posing the question: Can the Vatican evolve before it dissolves?  As promised on The Meddlesome Priest Face Book page, here’s my answer. Like some jolly Liberty ship captain in the mid-Atlantic of 1942 trying to avoid U-Boat torpedoes, Pope Francis careens left then right at the first sign of a theological periscope. For nearly two thousand years, the Vatican was a ship on a straight course. The Pope was its unquestioned helmsman and the College of Cardinals provided resolute navigation. This was made possible because there existed an indubitable synergy between Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology. Scratch any theology and you'll find a...

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical."     --- Thomas Jefferson Why, in the year 2015, is it still legal, in some states, to compel American workers to furnish funds for political campaigns that violate their individual conscience? To this day, only 25 states protect American workers from forced labor union dues to support politics the worker does not support. These 25 states are called 'Right-to-Work States’. The other 25 states are called 'Compulsory Union States’, accent on the word compulsory. That means you cannot get or keep your job unless you join the labor union that holds an exclusive right to negotiate your contract for wages and working conditions. From 1948 until 1988, as a result of the Taft-Hartley Act, individual labor union members in compulsory union states had no way to protect their union dues from winding up supporting politics they despised. The Act ...

WIND BREAKING NEWS! Finally, President Barack Obama and UN Secretary-General Ban Kee Moon have admitted they got the cause of global climate change wrong. Good for them. In a joint Rose Garden press conference today, President Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Kee Moon announced that 99.999 %    of the world’s climate scientists now agree that global warming climate change is actually caused by bovine flatulence rather than human fossil fuel consumption.  In prepared remarks given to reporters the President asserted; “Debate is over. It’s time to act decisively. I’m not a flatulentologist, but when 99.999 %  of them, all over the globe, tell me that this is true beyond doubt, then I must accept it. Moreover, methane emissions from cow flatulence, exhaling and belching is reaching catastrophic proportions and is the single most contributing factor to global warming. Therefore, I am asking Congress for 3 Trillion dollars to establis...