There’s a guy you’ve never heard of who runs an organization you’ve never heard of but it is likely because of him that the Catholic Church has not taken a stand against the radicalization of the Girl Scouts and now the Boy Scouts. Robert McCarty is the Executive Director of the National Federation of Catholic … Read more
One of the problems of a growing global population that needs to be solved is how do we feed all those extra mouths? We’ve looked at UN reports on this issue. We’ve also looked at counterviews that actually there is enough food for us all at the moment and the lack of food for many … Read more
A new report was released on Monday by the UN’s high level panel on global sustainability. Unsurprising its conclusion is that the world’s current economic , environmental and demographic trajectory is wildly unsustainable. According to the UN estimates, as reported by Reuters: As the world’s population looks set to grow to nearly 9 billion by … Read more
Four centuries ago Galileo was condemned by the Papacy for promoting the theory of a heliocentric universe, because the science was in conflict with Biblical beliefs. Recently, Australian prelate Cardinal George Pell rang the changes on the belief versus science theme in a lecture delivered at the 2011 Global Warming Policy Annual Forum, Westminster Cathedral … Read more
War criminal Ratko Mladic, the Serbian general accused of genocide during the 1990s Bosnian war, was arrested last week. This week he will be extradited to The Hague, a decade after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for his arrest. Despite western media portrayals, many Serbians consider Mladic a hero and defender of … Read more
Europe is dying. The Washington Post, among others, reports that, within a hundred years, there will be the rare German in Germany or Italian in Italy. Some demographers believe it is too late to correct Europe’s plunge into extinction. “The fall in the population can no longer be stopped,” reported Walter Rademacher of the German … Read more
I’ve read the stories on and off for some time: Unless things change, our oceans could be out of fish by 2050. The latest report from the United Nations says that, according to current estimates, a fish-less world is quite possible within 40 years unless stocks are allowed to recover: According to the UN, 30 … Read more
Remember those white phosphorus shells that the Israeli government swore up and down were never used on the United Nations compound in Gaza last January? Well, they were wrong. Paul Wood of BBC News in Jerusalem reports: Buried in paragraph 108 of the Israeli report to the UN is the key fact of the document. Two … Read more
God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Penguin Press, 416 pages, $27.95 Â It was a commonplace of the late 1960s that religion was obsolete and that modern 20th-century people had no need of faith. “Is God Dead?” Time asked in 1966, and books … Read more
InsideCatholic is headquartered in Washington, D.C., but I write from Oxford, Mississippi. Oxford has a population of about 14,000, which approximately doubles when the University of Mississippi students are in town. So, as you might imagine, the presidential debate here at Ole Miss tonight — assuming it comes off — is a big deal. The … Read more
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals were ushered in with global fanfare and media hoopla in 2000. It is nothing short of an ambitious renovation of the political, social, and economic structures of the world. Of course, it’s not billed as Development of a Planetary Parliament; it is presented to the world as an … Read more
Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States was a huge success. The eyes of America were upon him, and most people liked what they saw — very much. Benedict is not the trained actor and charismatic figure that Pope John Paul II was, but there is a fundamental decency that shows through to compliment … Read more
December 10, 1948: Keep your eye on that date. It’s likely to have an important symbolic role in Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit to the United Nations and the United States. Â Religious and civic pageantry, teddy bears wearing T-shirts with papal-visit logos, and celebrity worship may be the visit’s most obvious features. But people … Read more
Can the recent United Nation’s call for a world moratorium on the death penalty be used to end abortion as well? It may not be as unlikely as it sounds. Hot-button pro-life and pro-family issues have the power to define politicians and their campaigns. Yet the campaign debates on pro-life matters have centered largely on … Read more
This is the fourth of a four-part debate between Robert R. Reilly and Russell Shaw on the question, “Was the Iraq War just?” Â It simply will not do to demote the importance of enforcing treaties at the end of wars to some kind of adolescent “need to save face.” After World War I, the … Read more
This is the second of a four-part debate between Robert R. Reilly and Russell Shaw on the question, “Was the Iraq War just?” Sometime in late 2002 I composed a sort of mantra that I then took to repeating to family and friends: “I watched the first Gulf War in 1991 on TV in a … Read more
For over half a century, well-intentioned, well-educated people in the West were taught to dread an inevitable “population bomb,” caused by a worldwide explosion of births and a dearth of resources. Examples abound: • In 1946 Julian Huxley, first head of UNESCO, wrote, “War is a less inevitable threat to mankind than is population increase.” … Read more