Cool...Mel Gibson movie on the Passion to be in Latin and Aramaic.

Even though the Catholic Church in the United States has significantly grown in the last few years, I'd be curious to know what percentage of new members in other growing religious faiths (e.g., Mormons, Evangelical Protestants, etc.) are fall-away Catholics. I once heard on EWTN that behind the Catholic Church, the second largest Christian "denomination" in the United States are people who were once Catholic.

Students from across the country today will be holding a "See You At The Pole" event at their schools to offer prayers for classmates, parents, friends, and their country. Although it is held out as being "interdenominational" (i.e., Catholics can participate too!) See You At The Pole tends to primarily attract good-hearted folks from the various quarters of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestantism. Myself, I see this event as an annual test for school principals and school districts on their understanding of the meaning of free speech.

Another Chinese bishop, loyal to the Holy See, is arrested.

"Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake:"

-- Matthew 5:11 (DR)

Unlike their cohorts in academia, liberal pro-abortion activists set sights at destroying another great nominee for the federal judiciary.

So how bad was anti-Catholicism within America's Protestant subculture? Here's a resolution that the National Association of Evangelicals, a multi-denominational group that many prominent Fundamentalists like Bob Jones think is too "liberal", adopted prior to the presidential election of John F. Kennedy in 1960:

Roman Catholicism And The President Of The United States

Whereas, separation of Church and State is the historic American principle, BE IT RESOLVED that the NAE state its belief:

1. That discussion of the church-state separation principle along with all of its implications is legitimate and inevitable whenever public office is under consideration, and

2. That commitments to the principle of church-state separation are necessary from all political candidates for the Presidency regardless of their religious affiliation, and

3. That the commitment of a Roman Catholic candidate to the separation principle is particularly necessary because the Roman Catholic Church, both as a political and religious organization, has for many centuries fostered the policy of church establishment in various degrees, according to its own political and religious interests within a situation, and has exerted pressures on public officials to that end, and

4. That the real source of unrest in respect to church-state separation is the total lack of any convincing commitment of the Roman Catholic Church to the principle of church-state separation, which could only come from the highest authority of that organization and could only be evidenced by the realignment of Catholic policy in those countries where Catholicism is now the established religion, and

5. That due to political-religious nature of the Roman Catholic Church, we doubt that a Roman Catholic president could or would resist fully the pressures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Prior to the NAE redesigining their website, I pulled some other old resolutions they had regarding, I believe, the "danger" of allowing Bishop Samuel Stritch to be elevated to the College of Cardinals. I've only glanced through the NAE's resdesigned site, and while they actually admit to adopting anti-Catholic resolutions like the one above, I didn't see anything about a subsequent rescinding of them. Very curious.

Outside of the loony fringes of the Bob Jones' and Jack Chicks' of this world, is anti-Catholicism among most of our separated Protestant brothers and sisters really a thing of the past? In taking a look at some of the courses offered by a few of the more popular "born again" Protestant colleges in this country, one has to wonder. For example, here is a course offered at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles (BIOLA) University:

TTTH707 Roman Catholic Theology
Units:2.0
School:Talbot School of Theology
Course Description:
A detailed study of the tenets of Roman Catholicism; reading from representative Roman Catholic literature; particular attention given to the distinctions between Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrines. Especially helpful for those contemplating missionary service in countries dominated by Roman Catholicism. Elective .

Here is course offered at Trinity International University, whose law school I am a graduate of (Yes, I did lodge a formal complaint after I discovered it. As expected, they denied the course was designed to train Evangelical missionaries on how to convert Catholics):

ST 737 ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY
An examination of the claims and practices of traditional Roman Catholicism, of the "revolution" introduced by the Second Vatican Council, and of current modernist and traditionalist trends, together with an evangelical critique and an evaluation of the possibilities of collaboration with and evangelism among Catholics today.

So yeah, while secular humanism is the greatest cause of anti-Catholicism in America today, one can clearly see that some of the hostility toward the Church is still flowing out from this country's Protestant subculture.

Retired janitor of a Catholic high school in So.California beomes one of its largest donors.

"D'Heygers, who dropped out of school after the eighth grade in Belgium, has spent the bulk of his adult life serving students who begin their Mater Dei years at the age when his own education ended. Now retired from his position as head caretaker, he still lives on campus. His living room displays crosses and Mater Dei memorabilia, including an honorary high school diploma. Announcements from the school's speaker system filter in. Students talk to him around his dining room table, where his black cat, Monarch II, jumps up to be petted."

What are the chances that Mel Gibson is a SSPX sympathizer? Let's hope Jim Caviezel doesn't possess this attitude and is able to talk some sense to Mel.

Regarding the item below this, the state court of appeals apparently ignored Bacus v. Palo Verde Unified School District (11 F.Supp.2d 1192), a 1998 federal case in California that held there was nothing unconstitutional about a reference to Jesus Christ in a school board invocation.

And don't give me any lip about California's establishment clause being more narrow than the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The state Supreme Court has definitively ruled in East Bay Asian Local Dev. Corp. v. State of California, 24 Cal.4th 693 (2000) that if a policy or act by the government does not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, it will not violate the state's establishment clause.

In an apparent fit of "9th Circuit-itis," a California state court of appeals rules that invoking the name of Jesus Christ during a city council invocation is unconstitutional. Curiously enough, the guy who brought the suit against the city council is sitting in jail for allegedly plotting to bomb a mosque and a congressman's office.

Sacramento Kings fans: Feel the groan.

Awww, two lying pro-abortion adulterers hugging one another. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?

In a straight party line vote, Dummycrats reject nomination of Prescilla Owen to the federal judiciary. This probably would have never happened, of course, if "Jumpin'" Jim Jeffords hadn't switched parties and given the Dummys a one person majority in the Senate, and thus a majority on the Judiciary Committee.

Unsurprisingly, there is a severe shortage of priests in the Sacramento diocese. There are lots of reasons for this, but it certainly doesn't help that the diocese draws most of its priests from questionable and uninspiring seminaries like St. Patrick's in Menlo Park and Mount Angel in Oregon.

"St. Patrick's had as its academic dean, Father Carl Schipper, who was arrested for soliciting sex with minors and distributing child porn over the internet in 2000. San Francisco archbishop William Levada invited Father Gerald Coleman to take his place. Coleman is well known as a supporter of what he calls "chaste" homosexual unions and publicly opposed Proposition 22, the defense of marriage initiative. Michael Rose interviewed seminarians at Mount Angel seminary in Oregon for Goodbye, Good Men, who said their superiors persecuted them for praying the rosary."

Arrgh... No time to really blog , so here's something to ponder: To assert that God knows the future wrongly assumes that God has a past and a future. In other words, because God is outside the bounds of time and space, God does not know the future, but "only" knows.

Have a great Labor Day weekend. I intend to use part of it reviewing a case on appeal involving the Boy Scouts and the People's Republic of Berkeley.

I just learned an interesting fact about my native Los Angeles. The city was actually named after the Blessed Mother and the title she holds as the Queen of Angels. As a relatively recent Catholic convert (about 4 years), this was quite a pleasant discovery. However, as a product of the public school system in California, I'm pretty steamed that this kind of information was withheld from me.

The new NFL season is approaching and, alas, another year will go by without my native Los Angeles having a team. Having a grown up a die-hard Rams fan, I was crushed when they left for St. Louis in the early nineties. I just wish the ownership of the Rams would show some class and change the name of team, like the Browns and Oilers did when they left for Baltimore and Tennessee.

I'm thinking of adopting the New Orleans Saints as my new favorite team, because, well, of the reference to saints. I don't know. Maybe I just won't pay much attention to pro football again like I have for the past 7-8 years.

Ha! In relation to the post below, Bob Jones III apparently quotes a hymn written by a Catholic priest (Frederick Faber) to defend his proposed substitution of the word "fundamentalist" with "preservationist". The hymn, Faith of Our Fathers, was also apparently inspired in part by the awful persecution of Catholics by Henry VIII. Thanks to Kathy C. for the 411.