by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk One widely-encountered idea today is that there is no black and white when it comes to morality, only a kind of “gray area.” This is often taken to mean that we really can’t know with certainty what is right and wrong, allowing us to “push into the gray” as we make […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk On Jan. 20, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a mandate placing First Amendment rights and religious freedom in the crosshairs. The mandate, as a provision of ObamaCare, requires “preventive health services” to be covered by all health insurance issuers and all group health plans. Those insurance […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk. ONCE I MET A woman who had worked for years in fashion and modeling. Unsurprisingly, she was strikingly attractive. She was accompanied by her teenage daughter who, by contrast, was rather unremarkable to look at, maybe even a plain Jane. After spending time with them, I began to sense that the […]
DURING A 2011 roundtable discussion on Fox News, guest commentator Jay Thomas argued that young people should not be too concerned when it comes to pre-marital sex, because nobody would choose to “buy a car without driving it first. You don’t get married, and you don’t learn about sex, by not having it.” Any reasonable […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk Last month, an advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta recommended that nine- to 12-year-old boys be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus transmitted through sexual contact. The goal of the recommendations was to prevent cancers caused by HPV, such as certain cancers […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk IN A RECENT COLUMN, David O’Brien, the associate director of religious education for lay ministry in the Archdiocese of Mobile, Alabama, recounts the story of Agnes and Jake, devout Catholics who conceived and delivered four children during the first five years of their marriage. Agnes described how Jake, “wanted to be […]
A recent news report chronicled a Chinese woman named Huang Yijun. Sixty years ago, her unborn child died, but the pregnancy was never expelled from her body. Instead, her baby’s body slowly began to calcify inside her, becoming a crystallized, stone-like mass. Such stone babies (known as lithopedions) are extremely rare. When Huang was 92, […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk A CATHOLIC physician once related to me a powerful story about one of his patients, who had just received a diagnosis of advanced, metastatic cancer and had a relatively short time left to live. The patient mentioned to the doctor that he was Catholic but had drifted away from the Church […]
by Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk People often surmise that same-sex attraction is inborn, and that homosexuals are “naturally gay” or “born that way.” They suppose that if God made them that way then it must not be a sin to act on their sexual desires. The possibility of a “gay gene” is sometimes offered as a […]
