Teens come up with trigonometry proof for Pythagorean Theorem, a problem that stumped math world for centuries https://t.co/g0z8IObsu4 via @60minutes — Paul Epps (@paulepps) May 18, 2024 These young ladies attended St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic school for young Black women in New Orleans. The school has a 100 percent graduation rate and a 100 percent college acceptance rate. There’s no test to get in, but expectations are high and rules are strict: no cellphones, modest skirts, hair must be its natural color. The success formula seems to be pretty simple and that is that the school instills in students the idea that they have the ability to accomplish anything. I’ve always thought that would work. It seems like the message that most Black Americans, kids and adults, get is that if you’re Black, you can’t be successful in America because of racism. Your efforts will not be rewarded fairly.… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Catholic Church
No Communion for You, Pelosi
Long overdue. How can a practicing Catholic have more reverence for abortion than for the precepts of the Church? (FTR, I'm not anti-abortion or Catholic.) https://t.co/jXAVB341ru — Paul Epps (@paulepps) May 20, 2022 Read more →
Good Catholics
You cannot be a good Catholic and support expanding a government-approved right to kill innocent human beings. — San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone San Francisco — that’s Nancy Pelosi’s parish! I’m not opposed to abortion myself but I am opposed to politicians like Pelosi and Biden who market themselves as “good Catholics” while maintaining a weird reverence for abortion. Read more →
On This Date: Settling Clergy Sex-Abuse Cases
On this date, July 15, in 2007, the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles announced it was settling clergy sex-abuse cases for $660 million. Some people, including some in my own family, will tell you that America started going down the drain when we took God out of schools, whatever that means. Call me a skeptic but we haven’t taken God out of churches and yet we still have $660 million worth of child rape. In one archdiocese! Pass the collection plate, Padre! Read more →
Jesus and Mo: These Are Not Jokes
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The pope said yesterday that Satan — that’s me — “has been let loose and he’s got it in for the bishops.” My reaction is that I am proud to be thrown under the bus alongside rape victims, abused unwed mothers and financial whistleblowers for the greater “good” of the church. By the way, have you noticed that “prophet” and “profit” are homonyms? See you in Hell! Read more →
See You in Hell . . . if There Is a Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] John Lennon lyrics are now Catholic doctrine! See you in Hell! Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Pope Francis and Donald Trump were both vexed this past week by natives of shithole countries. The pope showed up in Chile to accuse local sex abuse victims of calumny against the church. “Calumny” means he’s calling them liars. Look it up. Oh that reminds me! Cardinal Law sends his regards. Then he was on to Peru, where he called violence against women a “plague” across the Latin American region. They’re murderers, rapists . . . and some, I assume, are good people. What a character! I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. See you in Hell! Read more →
See You in Hell: Cardinal Law
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Arrivederci Roma! This is a tough one . . . hypocrites go in the Eighth Circle with frauds, but rapists go into the Seventh Circle for the violent. Anyway, Cardinal Law says hi. How appropriate that he was able to die before the end of 2017, when the Dictionary.com Word of the Year was “complicit.” See you in Hell! Read more →
Praised Be Blindness
Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, published in Rome his spiritual exercises. There he wrote this testimony of blind submission: “Take, Lord, and receive all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will.” And as if that were not enough: “To get everything right, I must always believe that what I see as white is black, if the Church hierarchy so determines.” — Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors Read more →
Happy Birthday, Pope Urban VIII
Pope Urban VIII, the most recent pope to use the pontifical name of Urban, was born on this date, April 5, 1568. He is probably best remembered for his demon-killing exorcisms used to chase from the head of Galileo Galilei the devilish notion that the earth revolved around the sun . . . Read more →
Arguments of the Faith
For six centuries and in several countries, the Holy Inquisition punished rebels, heretics, witches, homosexuals, pagans . . . Many ended up at the stake, sentenced to roast over a slow fire fed with green wood. Many more were subjected to torture. Here are some of the instruments used to extract confessions, modify beliefs, and sow panic: the barbed collar, the hanging cage, the iron gag that stifled unwanted screams, the saw that cut you slowly in two, the finger-stretching tourniquet, the head-flattening tourniquet, the bone-breaking pendulum, the seat of pins, the long needle that perforated the devil’s moles, the iron claw that shredded flesh, the pincer and tongs heated to fiery red, the sarcophagus lined with sharp nails, the iron bed that extended until arms and legs got pulled out of their sockets, the whip with a nail or knife a the tip, the barrel filled with shit, the… Read more →
What Are the Rules on Refusing a Religious Funeral?
PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. —- The father of the Orlando gunman said his son was buried at a Florida cemetery this week. Seddique Mateen would not say where his son, Oman Mateen, was buried, but said it was an Islamic burial. — WPBF.com Is a Muslim entitled to an Islamic funeral no matter what kind of atrocity he commits, in particular, an atrocity committed in the name of Islam? What are the rules on this? Would a Catholic, for example, who pledged allegiance to the Pope before shooting 100 people be entitled to a funeral mass in the Church? I remember a couple of years ago in Australia when an Islamic extremist got himself and a couple of hostages killed in a siege, the funeral director with the Lebanese Muslim Association said this: We don’t care about him, we don’t know him, chuck him in the bloody shithouse. Nobody’s going… Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings from the underworld! I see that Pope Francis put a bee in Turkey’s bonnet a couple of weeks ago by calling the mass killing of Armenians in 1915 a genocide. According to the Turks, the Vatican should look to its own history before casting stones. Tu quoque! On that note, the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Biography was just awarded to David I. Kertzer for The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. Historically, popes have been far more circumspect in condemning genocide and other atrocities when committed by countries willing to aggrandize the Church (or when committed by the Church itself!) See you in Hell, clerics of all stripes . . . Read more →
Who Said It: Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula or Miss South Carolina Teen 2007?
Regarding Brittany Maynard: Suicide is not a good thing. It is a bad thing because it is saying no to life and to everything it means with respect to our mission in the world and toward those around us. Huh? If you said the Monsignor, you are correct . . . Read more →
Giving Clergy the Benefit of the Doubt
Seattle Archdiocese to pay $12 million to settle child sex abuse claims — MSN News Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they didn’t know that sex with children is wrong. Read more →
It’s Not That Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Pope John Paul II is being canonized this weekend because of 667,302 prayers for divine intervention, he miraculously answered two, years after he was already dead. What sort of evidence is required to certify that an earthly phenomenon was caused by a dead person? William of Occam would have pointed out that there are simpler explanations for a sick person getting well, e.g., The disease responded to treatment. The disease went into remission. The patient was misdiagnosed and did not really have the disease in the first place. I assure you that if 667,302 people with diagnosed medical ailments prayed to my dog, in at least two of those cases (and more likely, thousands), something unusual would happen. Years ago, a lower GI series revealed that I had a golf ball-sized (4 cm) tumor in my colon. The doctor did a colonoscopy a few days later and the tumor was… Read more →
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
If you don’t know me and I don’t know you, don’t call me up and shout, “Hey Paul! It’s Zach Flack with Equity Staffing!” as though I might have been sitting by the phone thinking “Wouldn’t it be a little slice of heaven if I got a call from Zach Flack over at Equity Staffing?” If I don’t know you, but I might recognize your name, then possibly some heightened level of emotion is warranted, e.g., “Hey Paul! It’s Bill Gates with Microsoft!” or “Hey Paul! It’s Pope Francis at the Vatican!” Otherwise, tone it down and stop annoying people. Read more →
We Aren’t in Business as Shopkeepers
[The Mayor, a Communist, has asked what penance Father Quixote would give him for fornication. Ellipses are in the original.] “You know–of course you don’t know–I don’t like the taste of tomatoes at all. But suppose Father Heribert Jone had written that it was a mortal sin to eat tomatoes and the old lady who lives next door to me came to me in the church to confess she had eaten a tomato. What penance would I give her? As I don’t eat tomatoes myself I wouldn’t even be able to imagine how deep her depravity might be. Of course a rule would have been broken . . . a rule . . . one can’t avoid knowing that.” “You are avoiding my question, father, what penance . . . ?” “Perhaps one Our Father and one Hail Mary.” “Only one?” “One said properly must surely be the equal of… Read more →
God in America
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion. — Atheists Outdo Some Believers in Survey on Religion – NYTimes.com The article describes a study in which researchers phoned up 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about religion. On average, respondents got half the questions wrong. Breaking down the results by faith (or lack thereof), the highest scores were registered by atheists and agnostics, closely followed by Jews and Mormons. Some of the knowledge gaps are amazing: Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation. Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ. As Nietzsche used to say: If you want happiness and peace of mind, believe.… Read more →