1. Trump blames Clinton for leaked campaign emails appearing to joke about Catholics and evangelicals, By Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Washington Post Online, October 27, 2016, 7:00 AM.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is making his pitch to Catholics, many of whom could serve as important swing voters in states such as Florida and Pennsylvania. The latest poll from the Public Religion Research Institute showed a stark divide among white Catholics: 44 percent said they support Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton while another 44 percent said they support Trump.
In a new interview with the global Catholic network EWTN scheduled to air Thursday at 8 p.m., Trump made his case, telling the global Catholic network what he prays for, his favorite saint and what sparked his evolution on abortion. He also blamed Clinton for leaked e-mails from her campaign that were widely circulated that appeared to show a staffer joking about Catholics and evangelicals.
One of the key issues some Catholics will likely consider while voting is the importance of the Supreme Court. Trump has promised to appoint justices who would overturn a ban on abortion.
2. Antonin Scalia, Disciple of the Word, By Ed Whelan, National Review Online, October 27, 2016.
Editors’ Note: On October 26, the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., posthumously honored Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia with its John Paul II New Evangelization Award. This is the prepared text of remarks that Mr. Whelan delivered at the award dinner.
I am deeply grateful for this opportunity to pay homage to a great and good man, a man to whom I owe so much, a man to whom we all owe so much, Justice Antonin Scalia. I would like to reflect on why we honor him this evening. And I want to let you hear more from him than from me, so I will draw extensively from his own words, including from two of his unpublished speeches.
Justice Scalia emphasized a fundamental Christian “lesson — that our choices really matter, and that everything depends on them.” That lesson, he went on, is “in some ways easier for the soldier to remember when life hangs in the balance. It is harder in the layman’s endless days of peace, where moral courage rarely requires the sacrifice of one’s life. But for most of us, that is the long fight we are in for — putting things right in the world God has created, starting with ourselves. . . . By teaching physical courage in service of others, [the Regiment] teaches moral courage — which, in the Last Accounting we must give, is the kind that matters.”
John Paul II elegantly compared faith and reason to “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Antonin Scalia was a man of faith and reason. His spirit soared to great heights on this earth, and we hope and pray that it has now risen to eternal heights.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441459/antonin-scalia-faith-law
3. Pope: God still weeps over today’s calamities and wars waged for money, Pope Francis’ Daily Homily, October 27, 2016.
Pope Francis said God weeps over the calamities and over the wars waged nowadays to worship ‘the idol of money’ and for the many innocent victims killed by the bombs. He stressed that God weeps because humanity does not understand “the peace that He offers us.” His words came during the Mass celebrated on Thursday morning in the chapel of the Santa Marta residence.
Taking his inspiration from a reading from the gospel of Luke where Jesus weeps over Jerusalem, the “closed” city that “kills the prophets and stones those sent” to it, Pope Francis’ homily reflected on some of the moments of weeping during Christ’s ministry. He explained that Jesus had the tenderness of His Father looking at his children when he wept over the city of Jerusalem in the gospel account saying: “How many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,f but you were unwilling.”
“Somebody said that God became man in order to be able to weep, to weep over what His children had done. The weeping in front of the tomb of Lazarus is the weeping of a friend. This is the weeping of the Father.”
