Christmas "track-kill" 2005

The Garden Enclosed -- David Jones, & Brother Angelo Elliott FBE -- RIP

http://fbecommunity.org/04-04-02_bro_angelo.html

Abortions in Spain rise by 72 percent in 10 years

Abortions in Spain rise by 72 percent in 10 year - Dec 27 1:29 PM

The number of abortions carried out in Spain has risen by almost three quarters in the past decade but the figure remains low by European standards, the country's health ministry said. In 2004 the total reached 84,985, up by 6.5 percent on 2003 (79,788) et [sic] 72 percent on 1995 (49,367), it reported.

For women aged between 15 and 44 the rate per thousand was 8.94 in 2004 compared with 8.77 in 2003. But Health Minister Elena Salgado, taking the 2002 figure, said that Spain's figure was lower than that of Germany (15.35 percent), Finland (16.41 percent), France (18.34 percent), Denmark (18.9 percent), Italy (20.46 percent), Britain (22.82 percent) and Sweden (25.63 percent).

The great majority (86.7 percent) of abortions were carried out in private clinics, while 9.7 percent were carried out in private hospitals and 3.6 percent in public hospitals. The intervention in the first weeks of pregnancy costs between 300 and 400 euros in a private clinic. Abortion was decriminalised in Spain in 1985 for certain cases: after rape, in the case of malformation of the foetus and if the pregnancy represents a threat to the physical or mental health of the woman.

The report said 95.7 percent of abortions were carried out for the last reason.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/27/051227182908.unrgpfgk.html

"I'll be back...."

I don't agree with the death penalty, but this is interesting.....





The governor strikes back, by Debra Saunders -- Dec 29, 2005

"This month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave Our Betters in Europe a taste of their own bitter medicine. Angry at the governor's refusal to stop the Dec. 13 execution of convicted four-time murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, city leaders of Graz, Austria, mobilized to remove Austria's most famous son's name from a stadium. Schwarzenegger responded with a "Dear Johan" letter. In it, he revoked the city's permission to use his name on the stadium and to promote Graz as a tourist destination. Schwarzenegger also returned a "ring of honor" bestowed by his hometown in 1999. "It is already in the mail," the governor wrote in German....."
Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/debrasaunders/2005/12/29/180615.html

Kwanzaa: A Holiday From the FBI

Kwanzaa: A Holiday From the FBI, by Ann Coulter -- Dec 28, 2005

"President Bush's 2005 Kwanzaa message began with the patently absurd statement: "African-Americans and people around the world reflect on African heritage during Kwanzaa."
I believe more African-Americans spent this season reflecting on the birth of Christ than some phony non-Christian holiday invented a few decades ago by an FBI stooge. Kwanzaa is a holiday for white liberals, not blacks.
It is a fact that Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by a black radical FBI stooge, Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga. Karenga was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI. ...."

Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/anncoulter/2005/12/28/180605.html

Great Article, if you have a moment

WE AREN'T THE WORLD

" This year, a great institution celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding, by another great institution who celebrated the 80th anniversary of his own founding. I'm honored to be a part of William F Buckley Jr's National Review, and hope to be so for many years to come. Here's the piece I wrote for December's 50th birthday issue:
A few months before the debut of National Review, the film White Christmas was released, in the course of which Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby find themselves sitting around a floundering Vermont inn wondering what they can do to save it. Kaye proposes bringing in some kind of novelty act.
Crosby: What do you think would be a novelty up here in Vermont?
Kaye: Who knows? Maybe we could dig up a Democrat.
Crosby: They’d stone him.
A lot can change in 50 years – and it would be a rash man who’d bet on the political map of America in another half-century. Indeed, political representation is itself a lagging indicator. Vermont may now be America’s leading Canadian province, yet Patrick Leahy is still, technically, a Danny Kaye novelty: the only Green Mountain Democrat ever to be elected to the US Senate and only the second Democrat Vermonters have ever sent to Washington.
That said, thumbing through National Review’s first issue, the 2005 reader will find many features of the landscape distressingly familiar: the warnings against “the growth of government – the dominant social feature of this century” and “the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias”. But these old battles don’t seem quite as epic today as they did back in November 1955. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the government’s still big; it’s the big picture that’s got small. The utopian progressivism of the left is a shriveled parochial thing these days.
Half a century ago, Leahy’s Senate seat was held by George Aiken, a Republican and the soi-disant “wise old owl” famous for advising LBJ on Vietnam, “Declare victory and come home.” Today’s Democratic line on Iraq seems to be: Declare defeat and come home to Vermont. It’s not just that Vermont has been Democratized, but that the Democratic Party has been Vermontified – a process encapsulated in Howard Dean’s explanation to CNN as to why he left the church he was raised in and became a Congregationalist:
I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church over the bike path.
He had a “big fight” over a bike path? Apparently so. “I was fighting to have public access to the waterfront, and we were fighting very hard in the citizens’ group," he told Judy Woodruff. Fighting, fighting, fighting – for a bike path. Dean’s church had strayed from the gently undulating and narrow. The road to hell is paved, whereas the shared-use trail to hell has attractive wood chips. And so Dean quit the Burlington Episcopalians and took up with the UCC. In the same week the Governor re-lived his profound doctrinal struggle over the bike path, he’d also professed himself utterly indifferent to the question of whether Osama bin Laden should be tried in a US court or at the Hague. “It doesn’t make a lot of difference to me,” he sighed, stifling his yawns, fighting vainly the old ennui. War? What is it good for? The Dems can’t even stay awake for it. ......"

The Chicago Sun-Times, November 17th 2002

Document copyright Steynonline.com. All rights reserved.

http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=21//

Mother Benedict Duss, founder of cloistered Connecticut abbey, dies

By John BohuslawCatholic News ServiceBETHLEHEM, Conn. (CNS) --

Gregorian chant echoed within the simple wooden Church of Jesu Fili Mariae Oct. 5 as Hartford Archbishop Henry J. Mansell celebrated a traditional monastic liturgy of burial in Latin for Mother Benedict Duss, retired abbess of the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem.Mother Benedict, who was the founder and first abbess of the Connecticut monastery for cloistered Benedictine nuns, died Oct. 2 at age 94. She would have turned 95 Nov. 21.During the funeral, she lay in an open pine and cedar coffin resting on two stools covered with sheepskins. The coffin was placed first in the sanctuary before Mass and then brought into the cloister during Mass.The more than three-hour service drew several hundred attendees, including retired Hartford Archbishop Daniel A. Cronin, several priests and dozens of religious sisters including 37 members of the abbey community, as well as religious brothers and laity.Father Robert F. Tucker, pastor of St. Anthony of Padua Parish in nearby Litchfield, preached the homily." We celebrate the love and life of Lady Abbess ... This was a great woman of faith, who had a spousal relationship with God," he said.Father Tucker said the outstanding accomplishments of the abbess were achieved by "determination, hard work and prayer." He recalled her strong determination not to let obstacles deter her.After the Mass, the coffin was placed on a wooden cart covered with flowers and drawn by two young black and white oxen from the abbey. The cart proceeded up a hill -- followed by Archbishop Mansell, priests, sisters and laity -- to the community's cemetery.After the archbishop's blessing, Mother Benedict was laid to rest in a grave dug by the sisters, who together shoveled it full of dirt.She was born Vera Duss on Nov. 21, 1910, in Pittsburgh to Elizabeth Vignier and John Duss, an attorney.At the age of 3, she emigrated to France with her mother and only brother, John. In 1936, she earned a medical degree from the University of Paris and in the same year she entered the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame de Jouarre, outside Paris, where she was given the name Sister Benedict. She was her religious community's physician.During World War II, the abbey was occupied by the German army, which put her at a particular risk since because was an American citizen. She fled the abbey to escape their notice but continued to treat those in the abbey and neighboring villages.After Allied forces liberated the abbey on Aug. 27, 1944, she resolved to start contemplative Benedictine life in her homeland.Having obtained the permission of the papal nuncio of Paris, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, she traveled to Rome to meet with Cardinal Giovanni Montini, who later became Pope Paul VI. She finally met with Pope Pius XII, who gave her permission to begin the founding of a contemplative order in the U.S.In 1946, Mother Benedict and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, a French nun, arrived in New York with just $20 in their pockets. Two years after industrialist Robert Leather donated 50 acres in Bethlehem, and with the help of countless people, the Regina Laudis Monastery was established.Mother Benedict at the time said the name Regina Laudis, which is Latin for Queen of Praise, was chosen because "Mary is the exemplar of praise for the Lord; she did nothing but live to meet God's terms."The story of the origination of the abbey was the basis of the 1948 movie, "Come to the Stable," written by Claire Booth Luce and starring Loretta Young and Celeste Holm.The early years were a struggle, but the nuns planted vegetable gardens, developed beef and dairy herds and pursued various crafts, such as blacksmithing, spinning, weaving, bookbinding and pottery.On Feb. 10, 1976, following the approval of its constitutions by the Holy See, Regina Laudis Monastery was elevated to an abbey; Mother Benedict received the abbatial blessing and the title of lady abbess. Mother Benedict become abbess emerita in 1994.A passionate scholar and master of Gregorian chant, Mother Benedict introduced the singing of chant from the first days of the abbey.Gregorian chant continues to be sung throughout the day and once at night. Under her direction, the nuns have released two recordings on compact discs.Today, the abbey's community comprises 37 women from 14 states and Europe. They operate a large working farm, several guesthouses, a monastic internship program for young people and a monastic art shop. They also sponsor an annual theater production.Mother Benedict once said of her work: "Founding a monastery is a continuous process of sawing to build your design and trying to dispose of the sawdust, while you're always being forced to reconstruct. You give it your all and it's never done... I lean on one of St. John of the Cross' basic principles. He said, in a situation where there is no love, you put in love and love will be there."Mother Benedict was predeceased by her co-foundress, Mother Mary Aline, 10 other members of her monastic community and her brother. Besides the nuns at Regina Laudis, survivors include two nephews, four great-nephews and two great-nieces.
http://www.abbeyofreginalaudis.com/

New York Times denies humanity of little people

• “Study Finds 29-Week Fetuses Probably Feel No Pain and Need No Abortion Anesthesia,” or so the New York Times announced, in a headline based on an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is admittedly based on no new research but offers the opinions of doctors who, it is said, have reviewed the pertinent literature. One of the article’s co-authors runs an abortion clinic and another, David Grimes, is vice president of the pro-abortion organization Family Health International and has personally performed over ten thousand abortions, of which 10 to 20 percent were later than the first trimester. One notes that neonatologists who treat premature babies as young as twenty-three or twenty-four weeks have long observed their patients reacting to painful procedures by crying and jerking away, and they routinely administer anesthesia during surgery. For the New York Times and other pro-abortion publications, denying fetal pain is an important tactic in denying the humanity of these little people. To that end, we are asked to believe that they feel pain in surgery but not when they are being chopped to death. To believe this requires an ideological conditioning of the mind to which most people, fortunately, are strongly resistant.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0511/public.html://

My first post, wow....NOT

It was a dark and stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall; it was said to the Tale-Teller, tell us a tale, and the tale ran thus: it was a dark and stormy night....







http://www.catholic.net/rcc/Periodicals/Faith/nov97/whatsright.html