Recently in The News Category

Sometimes there are things going on in the world that I don't want to know about, because I'd feel I should do something about them. This is one.

Orissa is a state in southeast India, and Kandhamal is a rural district there.

TIKABALI, India (Reuters) - On a starry night last week, as Lal Mohan Digal prepared to go to bed, a mob of raging, machete-wielding Hindu zealots appeared above the hills of his mud house and swarmed over this bucolic hamlet in Orissa.

By dawn, Christian homes in the village were smoking heaps of burnt mud and concrete shells. Churches were razed, their wooden doors and windows stripped off.

"We could hear them come shouting 'Jai Shri Ram'," Digal said, referring to the rallying cry of Hindus hailing their warrior-god.

The mob poured kerosene on the thatched rooftops of the village homes, then threw matches. Church spires were hacked down.

The Hindu part of the village was untouched. For four days Digal and his stricken Christian neighbours hid in the teak forests, before being herded to a government-run relief camp.

The violence replicated itself in village after village, as the rural Kandhamal district of Orissa convulsed from some of the worst anti-Christian attacks in India.

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The Church there is doing what it can:

Church petitions Indian Supreme Court to protect Christians in Orissa

NEW DELHI (CNS) -- The Catholic Church in India has petitioned the country's Supreme Court to protect Christian lives and property in Orissa state.

Archbishop Raphael Cheenath of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar told the Asian church news agency UCA News Sept. 2 that the church decided to approach the highest court "as we are not getting sufficient response" from the Orissa government.

The archbishop, whose archdiocese is in Orissa, said the church wants the court to order federal authorities to protect Christians in the eastern state.

"We want some clear help and response" from the government, added the archbishop, who has stayed in New Delhi since the violence broke out in Orissa Aug. 24.

The church petition seeks the deployment of sufficient riot police in villages where Hindu extremists continue to destroy churches and Christian buildings. It also demands that the Central Bureau of Investigation, the country's criminal investigative agency, probe the violence.

In addition to its regular judicial duties, the Supreme Court of India can take action if individuals file a petition with a question of public importance that needs the court's involvement.

Archbishop Cheenath said the attacks have now decreased, since "there are no more targets to attack." But in several villages Christians reportedly have been forced to sign documents declaring they are Hindus and have been asked to destroy their churches and other Christians' houses afterward.

The archbishop told UCA News all Christian institutions have been destroyed in the Kandhamal district, the worst-hit area of Orissa. The violence began there after suspected Maoists gunned down an 85-year-old Hindu religious leader and five associates Aug. 23. Hindu radicals targeted Christians, claiming they had masterminded the killings.

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AFP reports on Ingrid Betancourt's return to France after her liberation from FARC captivity:

A fervent Catholic who called her release a "miracle of the Virgin Mary," Betancourt has also been invited to meet Pope Benedict XVI. "It is a meeting that one cannot pass up," she told AFP.

Sometimes you know God is at work. It took just one sermon by a Catholic priest, and Obama's quit his Protestant church!

;-)

Some kid started one of the big LA fires.

I shouldn't be too surprised: a few years ago, a bored kid waiting for his mom to come out of an AA meeting in a Boston suburb set fire to some leaves outside the church where it was meeting. The building went up quite quickly.

A Connecticut priest pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges relating to embezzlement from his parish. Yet his admission of guilt sounds strangely remote:

"It's my understanding, your honor, that I used church monies, parish monies for means and for needs other than means and needs of the parish or the parishioners of the parish," Fay, dressed in a dark suit with a bandage on his hand, said in court. "My understanding is that it's by fraud."

"It's my understanding..." -- as if he had only recently come to know the information: as if he were just barely persuaded of its truth.

Here's a tip for readers: don't try that phrase in the confessional. It's better to just come out with your sins.

A crime, covered up in New Orleans? I suppose it's no surprise in that city, notorious for official corruption.

CNN reports that five medical experts judged mysterious deaths in a New Orleans hospital to be homicide, but the grand jury convened to review the case never saw their reports.

In a decision that puzzled the five experts hired by the state, New Orleans District Attorney Eddie Jordan never called them to testify before the grand jury. What remains unclear, because of grand jury secrecy laws, is whether the grand jury even saw the experts' written reports.

"They weren't interested in presenting those facts to the grand jury," said Dr. Cyril Wecht, the former coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a past president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists.

"The hard scientific facts are those from five leading experts, [the patients died] from massive lethal doses of morphine and Versed. As far as I know the toxicological findings were not presented to the grand jury and certainly not with quantitative analysis."

Our Lady was crowned Queen of Poland at Czestochowa in 1717; now that Poland has been delivered from Communism, laymen have proposed naming Christ our Lord as King of Poland. The proposal probably won't go through yet, but it's a laudable thought.

(Via Catholicgauze.)

The good news is that Fr. Bennett caught the young perpetrators in the act and scared them off before they could break into the wonderful Basilica in Boston. It's also good that they were untidy criminals: some of them came back to the church to get the drill they'd dropped, so the police were able to arrest three. The other two cared enough to bail out the three, so they came by the station to do that, and the police arrested them too.

Some of them appear to have pages on "myspace", and if these are the very same people, the pages reveal them to be a bunch of drunks barely out of high school who care only to party when they're not at their dead-end jobs: "Robby", "Alyse", "Jamie".

Some of them break into buildings for kicks, it seems: one friend posted on "Alyse's" page: "we should party and break into s--- again" (8/10); and she replied on his page: "we definetly need to break in to things and drink some more!" (8/11).

What do these people really need? What kind of life is this? They don't seem to have any connection to the Church: the two girls designate themselves as atheists.

Now, folks, don't post any comments on their pages....

Update: These whiz-kids removed their myspace.com pages from public view today, but Google has preserved snapshots of the pages from a few days ago.

It is a sad day for mainstream journalists and liberals everywhere: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is facing the judgment of God for his crimes.

Zarqawi scurried away from Afghanistan when the U.S., the U.K., and Afghan militias destroyed his protectors' government. Despite the Left's fanatical insistence that Saddam Hussein had "nothing to do with al Qaeda," Zarqawi set up shop in Baghdad two years before the war, as an honored guest of the regime. He was in bad company -- Iraq had sheltered several other major international terrorists. Saddam also had extensive contacts (not to say alliances) with terrorists, directly funded Ansar al-Islam and used terror groups as proxies in his vicious struggles with the Kurds and Iranians.

Two years ago, Zarqawi announced that his band of merry thugs and murderers would be the Iraqi franchise of al Qaeda. They have killed hundreds of Americans and thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis. They are the avowed enemies of democracy and have promised to institute a Taliban-style theocracy in Iraq if they triumph.

Zarqawi and other terrorist leaders have depended upon the Left's footsoldiers to broadcast news of their murders and bombings, with little context or explanation, and the Left has been happy to comply in order to harm the standing of President Bush and the war in Iraq. With yet another major terrorist undergoing the anger of Allah, it will be difficult to spin this as anything other than a victory, but I'm sure journalists will do their best. Within 24 hours, you will see stories that say, "Despite the Zarqawi's death, the violence continued in Iraq...."

May the remaining terrorists repent of their crimes and turn themselves in to the civil authorities for temporal punishment. For those who do not, may God visit his wrath upon them for the innocent blood they have shed, and the discord they have sown.

There have been three arrests in the case of nine church burnings in Alabama. So far it looks like it's the work of college kids who started it for thrills, burning five churches in two days; then they burned four more in another part of the state in an attempt to distract the police.

These crimes may provide a case study in how evil operates. It wasn't about race: half the churches were white. It may have been about the denomination: they were all Baptist -- but then, that's the main denomination in rural Alabama.

These were all small parishes, compared to what we're used to: congregations of a hundred or so -- in one case as few as 30 -- with aged buildings whose doors couldn't withstand a kick: probably not wealthy churches.

They were burned down by a pre-med student, son of a doctor; a theater major on scholarship, and a campus actor-rocker who had been student president at his high school.

If they're found guilty -- one has confessed already -- 90-to-135-year sentences should be adequate.