On the Square Today

George Weigel on the Fortnight for Freedom :

At this critical moment in history, there are two social justice priorities for the Catholic Church in the United States: the defense of life at all stages and in all conditions, and the defense of religious freedom for all. During this Fortnight for Freedom , in which the U.S. bishops are calling all Catholics to pray and work for religious freedom, it’s important to reflect on the linkage between these two great causes.

Also today, Betsy VanDenBerghe on society’s most unacceptable alternative lifestyle :

They occasionally populate New Yorker stories–characters on the peripheries of the narrator’s life, somehow only half human, almost surreal, because they’re single, celibate, and plan to stay that way until, someday, they marry. But the someday hasn’t arrived, and in the context of postmodern fictional settings, the chaste represent objects of repression, pity, and derision. Of the multitudinous lifestyles deemed acceptable and worth defending today, celibacy for singles stays off the list, almost as if its very existence threatens the well-being of the world as we know it.