Springtime in Pottersville

“Even so at this present time also,there is a remnant saved according to the election of grace. “

Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans (11:5)

Church of St. Jude, Jersey City, New Jersey

From The Remnant

By Christopher Gawley

I recently found myself standing before an old Catholic church and school building in the middle of New York. The abandoned structures were fairly typical of scores of churches and schools financed by immigrant dimes and nickels in the northeastern United States during the latter half of the Nineteenth Century.

If I’d looked around a little more I probably would have been able to figure out which nearby building had once housed the convent in which the teaching nuns had lived. The impressive stone facade of the church, along with the red-brick school building, was obviously built to withstand the test of time. The immigrant Catholics who’d raised these towering steeples were certainly not rich. But they understood they were housing the Real Presence of our Lord, and thus sacrificed a great deal to make it happen.

Sadly, many of these Catholic complexes, built in urban neighborhoods, have long since been turned into apartments or community centers or simply shuttered. Those that remain open could be much needed oases of light in a desert of urban blight, but, alas, are locked most of the time, their campuses hauntingly silent.

I closed my eyes and imagined the energy and activity that once defined these places a hundred years ago: the children of immigrant Irish or Italians, dressed neatly in school uniforms, Baltimore Catechisms in hand, in the tow of young nuns in full habit or chasing after good-natured priests in cassocks. I can hear the children’s laughter and the bells ringing, and smell the incense lingering over the holy sacrifices offered daily. I can see and hear and feel the lives of my forefathers that once bustled in this now-dead place. These men actually made things in America. They used their hands and toiled for long hours, six days a week. Their wives made due with little, despite considerable hardship and suffering.

"A Time for Choosing" by Ronald Reagan

The following was a televised campaign address for the Goldwater presidential campaign delivered on October 27, 1964.  Known as "The Speech," its ideas were honed over the course of a decade by Ronald Reagan as he spoke before GE corporate audiences.  It encapsulates every theme of Ronald Reagan's political career and the presidency through which he freed millions and changed the world.

A Pillar of Reagan's Legacy: Religion

From The Center for Vision and Values

By Paul Kengor

Retrospectives on Ronald Reagan as the nation marks the centennial of his birth will touch upon every imaginable aspect of the man. I suspect, however, that the thing most integral to the man, and most consistent throughout his life — that is, his religious faith — will not be as front and center as it should.

That was something I learned quite unintentionally. It began in the summer 2001, when I was at the Reagan library researching what I thought would be a fairly conventional biography. I scoured a fascinating cache of documents called the Handwriting File. There, I glimpsed Reagan's literal input, in speeches, proclamations, you name it. And it was there, in marked-up drafts of speeches such as the "Evil Empire" address, that I encountered an intensely religious Reagan, a man making constant, seamless references to God. I found eye-opening private letters, including one where Reagan employed C.S. Lewis' classic "liar, Lord, or lunatic" argument to, essentially, evangelize the Christian message.

Lee Greenwood - 'God Bless the USA'

Happy Birthday to The Gipper!

From the Pastor - 'Light from Light'

A weekly column by Father George Rutler

There is that guileless definition of saint by a little girl who was thinking of the stained-glass figures: “A saint is somebody the light shines through.” Saints do radiate the light of truth, which comes from God. The “Light from Light” was actually seen in the Transfiguration of Christ, much to the bewilderment of the apostles, whose impressions of heavenly bliss up to then had been only metaphorical. Divine light shines as joy. Christ astonished multitudes and angered others, he inspired many and perplexed many more, but he never made anyone sad. Even his mother’s sorrows were descants on her canticles of joy.

Saints suffer much, like a man with perfect pitch hearing noise, but they have a joy that “no one will take away” (John 16:22). The theologian Baron von Hügel (1852-1925) thought Blessed John Henry Newman a “sad and somber character.” The Baron, who was born to Austrian and Scottish parents in Italy and lived most of his life England, was a lugubrious man himself, and when he wrote ponderously in one language he seemed to be thinking in another. It has been remarked that the only times Newman is said to have been depressed were the times he was visited by Baron von Hügel. Newman was not a man of levity, but joy is not always evident to the superficial eye. Chesterton said that the one thing our Lord concealed was his mirth.

Christ’s prescription for joy is written in his Beatitudes. Blessedness is happiness deeper than the sensory happiness known as “hilaritas” or the moral contentment called “felicitas.” Blessedness is contact with the Source of all joy. It is a mistake to analyze the Beatitudes as didactic instructions in moral behavior. Nietzsche made that mistake and concluded: “In Christianity neither morality nor religion comes into contact with reality at any point.” Theodore Dreiser, the radical social reformer, was greatly impatient with the “idealistic maxims of Christ” precisely because he read them as idealistic maxims. Both of these men seem to have been very sad people, but it was not Christ who saddened them. Neither could admit that blessedness is possible. Nietzsche said “Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul.” But the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount is that the essence of a soul comes from outside the soul. The self that lives only for itself is saddened by itself.

The moral life lived apart from the Lord of Life becomes burdensome and arbitrary. To understand the joy of the Sermon on the Mount, one has to look to the other mounts: Tabor where the Light of Christ shone; and Calvary where that Light shone in the darkness and “the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Father George W. Rutler is the pastor of the Church of our Saviour in New York City. His latest book, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, is available from Crossroads Publishing.

Live, Streaming Coverage of Reagan Centenary Events

Watch live streaming video from reaganlibrary at livestream.com

We are pleased to provide live, streaming coverage of Reagan Centenary events from the Reagan Library.  Bookmark this page and check back here for the following events:

February 5, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. PST  (10 p.m. EST)

A Concert for America – A Tribute to Ronald Reagan

For more information, click here

February 6, 2011 at 10:00 a.m. PST  (1 p.m. EST)

Ronald Reagan Centennial Birthday Celebration

For more information, click here

February 10, 2011 at 8:30 a.m. PST  (11:30 a.m EST)

Ronald Reagan Centennial Postage Stamp Issued

The Leadership of President Ronald Reagan: Lessons and Legacy