It has happened, as feared:

From A conservative blog for peace correspondent Dave McLaughlin
Chaldean Catholics murdered in Iraq

The Word
In PDF (Acrobat) format - the magazine of the Antiochian Orthodox Church's metropolia in America

Patriarch of Moscow on the mend

Съ праздникомъ
Happy Julian-date feast day of the prophet Isaiah and of the moving of St Nicholas' body to Bari, Italy (translation of his relics, in church lingo), Eastern Orthodox. The Russians keep the latter feast and the Greeks don't, because it happened after 1054. The dividing line between East and West, though the two sides are distinct, isn't as clear as some think!

'The walls of the schism don't reach to heaven.'

A picture, on the St Nicholas Center site, of the Russian Orthodox chapel in the Catholic basilica of San Nicola in Bari: yet another example of goodwill to the Eastern Orthodox in Italy:


Photo: Anglican World/JMR

From blogforlovers.blogspot.com
Romania remembers its modern-day Christian martyrs
(ENI) Romania's church leaders are drawing up a list of martyrs who died for the Christian faith under Communist rule, and aim to publish it next year.

"All the mainstream churches suffered during the communist period here, so this is a significant ecumenical development," said Costel Stoica, spokesman for the Romanian Orthodox church's Bucharest patriarchate. "It's supremely important that the history of our churches is properly known, and that today's young generation is made aware of the strong moral stand which many people adopted," Stoica noted in an interview with ENI.

"We began collecting data in 1990, and have already published material on Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians who suffered for their faith. We've now established precise criteria for acknowledging acts of martyrdom," Stoica said.

The criteria include meeting a violent death, death from lack of food and water or prison torture because of ''hatred of faith and church," representatives of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant churches said after a meeting about the project earlier this year.

They said the list would include 120 Orthodox, 50 Latin (Roman) Catholics and 20 Protestants, as well as 150 martyrs from Romania's Greek Catholic church, which combines the eastern rite with loyalty to Rome, and was outlawed in 1948...

In a March 2002 census, almost 87 per cent of Romania's population of 21.7 million said they belonged to the Romanian Orthodox church, compared to about 6 per cent describing themselves as Latin or Greek Catholics, and 1 per cent citing membership of Protestant denominations...

From Rome correspondent John Boyden
Pope gives Rome church to Bulgarian Orthodox
The Church of SS. Vincent and Anastasius, Fontana di Trevi, in the city center

From christianitytoday.com
Today in church history
May 22, 337: Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, dies. Though known for calling the Council of Nicea (which condemned the Arian heresy) and for beginning the process of Christianizing the empire, he waited until just before his death before he finally accepted baptism into the church.

From A conservative blog for peace correspondent Lee Penn
‘Earth Spirit Rising’
Brought to you by the kind of people who call my friends 'not Catholic'. About the pseudo-Irishness, friend Archimandrite Serge (Keleher) uses this litmus test for such people: 'Do you speak the language?' (He does. They don't.)

‘Women religious’ embrace ‘eco-spirituality’
Quoth Dr Rosemary Radford Ruether: 'To allow unrestrained fertility is not pro-life,' she said.
'A good gardener weeds and thins his seedlings to allow the proper amount of room
for the plants to grow. We need to seek the most compassionate way of weeding
out people.'

Translation: Ve hef a final solution. Only ze fit vill reproduce, ja? (Actually what Margaret Sanger, a keen eugenicist whose Planned Parenthood published Nazi articles in the 1930s, believed and said.)

'We need to compost ourselves.' Dr R's fellow ethnic German, the late Dr Josef Mengele, couldn't have put it better.

Lee Penn: Ah, the 'Springtime of the Church' ......... and the 'spirit of the Council'.

Speaking of which:

Disillusionment
Interview: Abbot Boniface (Luykx), now in the Ukrainian Catholic Church, on the disaster of Vatican II

W’s secret society (Skull and Bones, at Yale) induction ritual exposed
Lee Penn: Our country is run by these folks. Sleep well.

rentapriest.com: Stupid

From Greg Singleton's site
(Western) high-church guide to Chicago

From workingforchange.com
‘This Modern World’ by Tom Tomorrow: The Republican Matrix