Tag: Flowers

The late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin embraced a philosophy that perfectly captures the official Catholic position on human value: the “consistent ethic of life,” more commonly known as the “seamless garment.”

In the last few years, it has become common to see people put their pronouns in their email sign-offs and to hear the phrase “gender fluid.”

My father did not have a happy childhood.

A few years ago, after I’d written a series of columns about how the Catholic church had borne a disproportionate share of criticism regarding the sex abuse scandal, a number of readers responded with such negativity that they all but confirmed the anti-Catholic bias.

Twenty-six years ago, members of a California-based cult named Heaven’s Gate committed suicide because they thought the comet Hale Bopp, which was passing close to earth in its 4,000-year orbit across the universe, was actually a spaceship that would take them home to paradise.

I’m sure that regular readers of this column think all I ever talk about, write about, ruminate on and care about is abortion.

It’s always good when people take time out of their busy schedules to protest what they believe to be an injustice.

When you have the beginning of a cold, nothing sparkly to wear and you really hate New Year’s, you watch television. If a certain station has the good sense to run a marathon of vintage Twilight Zone episodes, your choice is made from the moment you hear “doo dee da doo, doo dee da doo” coming from what you think is your flat screen-but which could, in fact, originate from another planetary system.

I generally hate year-in-review columns. They seem forced, like a list of things you must buy at the grocery store. Check this off, and then this, and we did this, and I need that, and we are out of this, and can we have extra of that, etc. Years blend into each other and it’s often hard to pick exceptional events, particularly since the same things seem to happen over and over again: Wars start and continue, and we think they end, and then they’re prolonged.

It’s still in the box, hidden from the triggered gaze. The only ones who know what lies inside the wooden slabs painted in the Italian flag colors are indigenous to Philadelphia, pun intended. It is the statue of an Italian icon, Christopher Columbus, a piece of public art that sat undisturbed for more than 40 years in its current location at the southern end of Broad Street on Marconi Plaza.