Conflict Between History and the Modern World - Then vs Now

Tel Aviv today
(Pro-Palestinian students at Columbia, Yale, MIT, NYU  yell,
"Hamas we love you! Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!")

The famous author Mark Twain managed to hitch a ride on a steam ship to the Holy Land in 1867. The young man joined a group of pilgrims he sarcastically named "the Innocents."

The ship was called Quaker City, a former Civil War ship. A budding writer, Twain's passage was paid for by a Californian newspaper. He wrote about the Holy Land in his novel Innocents Abroad, and unlike other writers of the day who Romanticized the place, Twain drew blood in his usual acerbic style -

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.

Freemasonry: What all Catholics Should know about it!

By Chriss Rainey

The subject of Freemasonry is complicated. It has a long and mysterious history involving people across several continents and individuals whose personal reputations we often find difficult to criticize. My own father and grandfather were Freemasons My brother is also a Freemason, and though I have tried diligently to convince him to leave it, he is certain it is not what I believe it to be. I know these men to be good and decent fathers and husbands. I have lived with them and loved them; it is difficult to imagine they were involved in anything as ugly as Freemasonry has proven to be.