Author: Tom Piatak (Tom Piatak)

  On Sunday, 522 Catholics killed for the Faith during the Spanish Civil War were beatified in Spain.  So far, some 1500 Catholic martyrs killed during the Spanish Civil War have been beatified.  The left is not pleased.  An article in the Guardian says that the killing of Catholics during the Civil War is “highly controversial,” “controversial” being the...

  While the political spotlight has been on the government shutdown, the Democrats have not forgotten that America’s political future will be shaped by the immigration bill passed by the Senate but stalled in the House.   In an effort to convince House Republicans to drop their opposition to the bill, congressional Democrats gave their support to a rally...

  Ten years ago, Chronicles was one of the few American publications pointing out that the American invasion of Iraq would be a disaster for Iraqi Christians.  And so it proved to be.  Since our invasion of Iraq, half of Iraqi Christians have fled, and those who remained have been targets of murder, extortion, and kidnapping by Islamists, who...

This Labor Day, elite opinion is pushing a piece of legislation that poses a clear threat to the interests of working Americans, the immigration bill supported by President Obama and passed by the Senate. By massively increasing legal immigration and regularizing illegal immigration, this bill promises to further depress wages and to throw more Americans...

Last Friday, Commonweal published an essay by former First Things editor Jody Bottum entitled “The Things We Share: A Catholic’s Case for Same-Sex Marriage.” The reaction of National Review’s Michael Potemra was to pronounce Bottum’s piece “fascinating and brave.” A less apt description is hard to imagine. Bottum’s essay is so meandering that it is...

Earlier this week, Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player, was brutally killed in Duncan, Oklahoma. Police have charged James Edwards and Chancey Luna with first degree murder for killing Lane. Lane was white; Edwards and Luna are black, though an accomplice, Michael Jones, charged with being an accessory after the fact, is white. Australian papers...

John McCain is back in the news.  The media is exulting that “The Straight Talk Express Is Back” because McCain has taken to denouncing members of his own party as “wacko birds” and to carrying water for Obama in the Senate.  As bad as Obama has been, America is probably fortunate that McCain never made it to the White...

It’s as if The Nation admitted Alger Hiss’s guilt, The New Republic discovered the virtues of evangelical Christianity, or National Review concluded that Barack Obama has been an outstanding president.  Yesterday, Consumer Reports gave the top ranking of any sedan to the 2014 Chevrolet Impala, the first American sedan the magazine has rated best in 20 years.  The disdain of Consumer Reports for American cars is...

  Much of the discussion over the immigration bill that just passed the Senate focuses on how it will deal with illegal immigration.  But much of the financial backing for the bill comes from Silicon Valley, which wants to vastly increase legal immigration, particularly the H1B visa program, which allows American employers to import technical...

Last week, Fr. Francois Mourad, a Syrian Catholic priest, was brutally murdered by Islamist rebels in Syria.  There is some uncertainty as to whether Fr. Mourad was beheaded or shot, although it seems more likely that he was shot.  What there is no doubt about is that his killers are part of the armed rebellion trying to topple the...

Today, the Senate passed an immigration bill that promises amnesty to illegal immigrants and a massive increase in legal immigration.  If this bill becomes law, one of its predictable effects will be to drive down the wages of Americans, particularly working class Americans.  Indeed, many millions of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed.  This week, the Cleveland Plain...

Tonight media reports are hyping a deal to add a border fence to the Amnesty Bill currently being considered in the Senate.   Only the gullible will believe that such a fence will ever be built.   After all, Congress authorized building a 700 mile border fence in 2006, but only 36 or so miles of the type of fence...

A bill that the media is touting as providing “comprehensive immigration reform” is currently making its way through the Senate.  In essence, the bill will provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants and vastly expand legal immigration, while doing nothing to prevent future illegal immigration.  In fact, we know from past immigration amnesties that they...

Whenever it is polically expedient, Barack Obama criticizes free trade.  He did it in 2008, when he told Ohio primary voters that he would renegotiate NAFTA.  He did it in 2012, when his campaign saturated the industrial Midwest with ads criticizing Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs to China at Bain Capital.  But these noises are...

Last weekend, Paris saw the third march of roughly one million people against gay marriage.  Those in attendance heard an amazing speech from Ludovine de la Rochere, the president of the organization that has been sponsoring the marches.  In it, de la Rochere echoed de Gaulle’s famous words from June 18, 1940:  “The law is today in effect: so isn’t the last word...

Every Christmas, we are instructed that there is no War on Christmas.  But the hostility to Christianity and Western culture that motivates the War on Christmas is in fact widespread.  The latest reminder came in an online piece this week in La Stampa, describing how the education minister in the Spanish province of Asturias had ordered schools there to...

Google often gets grief over the events and people it chooses to honor.  Much of this criticism is justified.  But sometimes Google gets one right, as it did today, when it honored Ella Fitzgerald.  Here is Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine, recorded in 1956.  Popular music does not get any better than this–the finest vocal...

  Several commenters have decried the lack of media coverage of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia.  Gosnell is charged with the deaths of one pregnant woman and seven children who were born after botched abortions; those children were killed by having their spinal cords severed.  Witnesses have testified that many more babies were also...

  The American Conservative has had dozens of articles and posts on gay marriage.  The general tenor has ranged from arguing that gay marriage is inevitable to criticizing opponents of gay marriage to arguing that support for gay marriage is the conservative position.  What has largely been absent is any opposition to gay marriage. There is, of course, nothing conservative about support...

In recent decades, the public profile of Easter in the United States has diminished.  Americans now spend more on Halloween than on Easter, and the public attention Easter receives is largely negative.  Google observed Easter Sunday by celebrating Cesar Chavez’s birthday, and public references to Easter are often excised, just as “Christmas” is often replaced...

I have not had the time or the inclination to wade through the commentary on Pope Benedict’s unexpected resignation, but I assume that much of it is angry, vituperative, and dismissive, because such commentary is one of the hallmarks of our degraded age.  I wanted instead to offer a brief note of gratitude for Benedict’s service as...

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon was largely eliminating restrictions on women serving in combat units.  This is perfectly consistent with the egalitarian ideology to which the Obama Administration is committed.   However, it ignores the reasons why Western armies have never included women in combat units, apart from a few exceptional circumstances. ...

  Peter Brimelow has written a discussion of the War on Christmas for VDARE.com that is well worth reading.  In it, Peter puts me in the unusual role of optimist.  There are still many people in this country who want to suppress the public celebration of  Christmas, and the situation in the schools, where culture is formed...

  Today brings the sad news that Robert Bork has passed away.  The sadder news for America, though, came in 1987, when the Senate unjustly rejected his nomination to the Supreme Court.  There is no doubt that, had Bork been confirmed, Roe v Wade would have been overturned in 1992 when the Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood v...

  One of the signature features of Western politics in the last few decades is the rise of the cultural Marxism known as “political correctness.”  As advocated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, leftists have worked their way through the institutions of the West, leaving a trail of cultural devastation in their wake.  A hallmark...

The power of Christmas (and Christianity) shows through even in unexpected places, such as Saturday Night Live.  When the producers of the show, in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Connecticut, were looking for something with beauty and emotional depth, they chose a song about the true meaning of Christmas, not a secular Christmas song or...

  Last night, my wife and I attended the vigil Mass for the Immaculate Conception at our parish.  We sat immediately behind a family I had often seen but never sat by before, a woman in her forties with Down syndrome and her father.  I could not help being moved by what I saw.  During Mass,...

Slovakia’s plan to issue a two Euro coin commemorating the 1150th anniversary of the arrival of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Great Moravia, of which Slovakia was a part, has run afoul of Christophobic Eurocrats.  It seems that the Slovaks want to show the Apostles to the Slavs with halos, and wearing pectoral crosses.  The Eurocrats say no,...

  After the election, Al Cardnenas, head of the American Conservative Union, complained that the Republican Party was “too old and too white and too male.”  One wonders what Mr. Cardnenas would say about the Continental Congress or the Constitutional Convention.  Of course, if Mr. Cardenas is upset at the thought of living in a country founded...

  Four years ago I wrote, “if Republicans want the joke to be on them, they can listen to  [Rich]Lowry [of National Review], line up to  damn the American auto industry, and look forward to losing the Great Lakes  states year after year after year.”  Tonight, I am sure that Mitt Romney regrets writing the op-ed piece the New York...

The Minnesota Timberwolves will be fielding a team this year that is only one third black.  That means that the Timberwolves will have a much higher percentage of blacks than the general population, though a far lower percentage of blacks than any other team in the NBA.  And this prospect is quite upsetting to Ron...

  Recently, Dan McCarthy of the American Conservative had a piece asking, “How Does A Traditionalist Vote?”  I would submit that an answer to that question can be gleaned by viewing this ad for Barack Obama, brought to my attention by one of America’s leading traditionalist thinkers, Chris Kopff.  In it, a tattoed college age woman implicitly compares voting for Barack...

  Today, Pope Benedict XVI canonized Mother Marianne Cope, the second canonized saint who worked at the leper settlement on the island of Molokai.  Cope, who was born in Germany and grew up in New York, answered a call from the King of Hawaii to work with the sick in Hawaii and ended up succeeding the heroic Father Damien in Molokai.  Shortly after...

This morning the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran an important opinion piece by Alan Tonelson of the redoubtable United States Business and Industry Council on manufacturing and the presidential election.  (The piece appeared earlier in other Ohio papers).  In his piece, Tonelson highlights the importance of Ohio in the election and the importance of manufacturing to Ohio.  Tonelson also explains why neither President Obama’s policies nor Romney’s are likely to...

Yesterday’s Washington Post reported that, according to a recent Pew Center study, 19.6% of Americans now describe themselves as having no religious affiliation.   They are the new foot soldiers of the Democratic Party:  68% of those with no religious affilation lean Democrat, a number that increases to 73% among self-described atheists and agnostics.  According to the Post, the religiously...

  Yesterday’s New York Times carried a piece by Michael Shear and Ashley Parker stating that the Romney campaign was going to stop running a campaign focused solely on the economy:  “Instead, Romney intends to hit the White House with a series of arguments–on energy, health care, taxes, spending and a more direct attack on Obama’s foreign policy...

  Today brings news of the death of Andy Williams at the age of 84.  I suspect most of those saddened by this news are near Williams’ own age, but I liked Williams’ singing and more generally have always enjoyed the American popular music that preceded and for a while coexisted with what became rock music. ...

Yesterday brought the shocking news of the murder of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, by a Moslem mob in Benghazi, Libya.  The site of the murder is significant:  Benghazi was the stronghold of the rebellion against Moammar Khadafy, a rebellion that succeeded only because of help from the United States.  Stevens’ murder brought...

  Yesterday the AP had a very interesting story on newly declassified documents that support the view that FDR and Churchill knew that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre of over 20,000 Polish prisoners of war at the same time they were publicly following Stalin’s lead and blaming the massacre on the Nazis.  Later on, of...

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has an interesting post arguing that globalization is the single most important factor in the decline of the American middle class.  Among other facts, Thompson notes that 97% of the jobs being created in America are in sectors of the economy not subject to foreign competition.    It’s good that at least some in the...

  Venues in which a person’s fidelity to Catholic teaching is generally viewed as a negative are suddenly voicing concern about Paul Ryan’s adherence to Catholic social teaching.  It’s not, of course, that Daily Kos or the Daily Beast have suddenly embraced Catholicism.  It’s that they’re worried that Ryan might help Romney win Catholic votes and the election, thus depriving Barack Obama of the...

  Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer has an article analyzing a revealing ad the Obama campaign is running here in Ohio.  In it, two women talk about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the HHS contraception/abortifacient mandate.  One of the women tells the other, “It’s about a woman being able to make decisions.”  The ad then informs the viewer that Romney...