A leading Vatican official on Friday condemned a US company’s announcement that it had created cloned human embryos from adult skin cells. The medical breakthrough could ultimately lead to the development of cures for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and other untreatable ailments.

Gotta love that paragraph.  Totally unfounded, unproven claim.

“This study demonstrates, for the first time, that SCNT can be utilized to generate cloned human blastocysts using differentiated adult donor nuclei remodeled and reprogrammed by human oocytes,” the researchers wrote in the study, which appear Thursday in the online edition of the journal “Stem Cells.”

And, also,

A scientist has achieved a world first… by cloning himself.

In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman’s egg.

The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.

Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

The brave new world continues…

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Y’know how only a third of Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist?

Well, apparently this factoid is based on faulty survey techniques…and Jimmy Akin explains it, along with a new survey revealing that some 81% of Catholics believe in the Real Presence!

So, we have a daughter due to arrive within the next couple of weeks, and we dutifully went to the parish baptism class this morning after Mass. Shortly, we found out that since we’d been once we didn’t need to go again (our nearly-three-year-old was baptised at one month of age.)  We were discussing how it’s going to be difficult because the baby is due to arrive on January 25, and yet Lent starts just a few days after; our parish only baptises the last Sunday of each month during Mass, and as a rule doesn’t do private baptism.  In addition, no baptisms during penitential seasons.  That means more than likely, it’ll be the Easter Vigil or the last Sunday in March before she can be baptised.

So the couple who teaches the baptism class says, “well, the Church is trying to get people away from the mentality that if you don’t get your baby baptised right away, terrible things will happen.”

Sad…

For those who thought the kookery would end when Rosie left “The View” (a show on ABC-TV in the USA which features numerous middle-aged women sitting on a set fulfilling stereotypes,) you shouldn’t have!  Joy Behar, alleged comedienne, is working hard to fill the void.  On the January 9 edition of the show, she and Whoopi spent time talking about how the Catholic Church has false idols (by way of statues) and also that there aren’t any saints anymore, because we now have psychotic drugs.  Yes, thanks to drugs, people don’t hear God’s voice anymore.  From the Catholic League:

On the January 9 edition of “The View,” panelist Joy Behar made it plain that she needs a shrink. She said the reason why there are so few saints anymore is because of “psychotropic medication.” She continued, “I think the old days, the saints were hearing voices and they didn’t have any Thorazine to calm them down.”

Besides being flatly wrong—a record number of saints have been named over the past few decades—it is Behar who needs to consult a shrink. Her musings about all things Catholic suggests a pathological condition so severe as to make those who hear voices positively sane by comparison.

Now Bill Donohue could have been a bit more charitable, but in fewer words, she’s knows not of what she speaks!

An Archbishop will be guiding part of President Bush’s tour of the Holy Land over the next couple of days, and he plans to scold Bush.

JERUSALEM (CNS) — A Catholic archbishop scheduled to accompany U.S. President George W. Bush on a tour of the Mount of Beatitudes said he would talk to him about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Depending on the conditions, Archbishop Chacour said he may also speak to Bush about the “blood on his hands.”

Funny, I just don’t think that Jesus wanted prisoners justly held to be released…I think He was probably talking about those unjustly held.  The guys at Gitmo are known to be terrorists who have taken action against Americans.  And when he starts talking about blood on Bush’s hands, he might do well to remember that without the USA’s attempts at diplomacy, the rest of the Mideast would have gone after Israel a long time ago…of course, if that had happened, the Israel would have slaughtered them all and imposed peace on the region…so maybe we wouldn’t have some of the problems we have now.

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In a case of patients running the asylum,

Pregnant students in a Denver high school are asking for at least four weeks of maternity leave so they can heal, bond with their newborns and not be penalized with unexcused absences.

The request is unusual in Colorado’s public schools, where districts tend to deal with pregnant students or new moms with specialized programs or individualized education plans.

The article goes on to say that the school in question requires students to return to school the day after being discharged from the hospital.  The idea that these kids want to take 4 weeks off from school and still complete school on time (or on time according to their IEP) is crazy.  To allow it is simply to continue allowing them to exist in the dream world of government education.

Of course, the optimal situation would be for each of these kids to give their babies up for adoption where they’ll actually have a chance at a normal upbringing with a stable home life.  Alas, in our self-absorbed culture, somehow the needs of the mother are ahead of the needs of the baby.  But then I am probably an evil, evil man for saying that.

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Time for the media to have another field day with the Church:

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) – A Roman Catholic priest was arrested on perjury charges Wednesday, accused of lying about his relationship with a mobster in testimony to a grand jury investigating a casino owner’s possible ties to organized crime.

The Rev. Joseph Sica was arrested outside his home in Scranton. He is an adviser to Mount Airy Casino Resort owner Louis DeNaples, who is the subject of the grand jury investigation.

Sica’s arrest is the first to result from the Dauphin County grand jury probe, which is focused on whether DeNaples misled the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board when he said he had no connections to organized crime.

Sica was accused of lying to the grand jury last August about his relationship with the late Russell Bufalino, an organized crime boss who served lengthy prison terms in the 1970s and ’80s, according to grand jury findings cited in court papers.

The papers said Sica falsely told the grand jury that he had met Bufalino only by chance and had no relationship with him.

Prosecutors said the finding was based partly on a photograph that showed the priest arm-in-arm with Bufalino and another photo of him with William D’Elia of Hughestown, who reputedly heads the Bufalino crime family now.

Also, in a 1982 letter to Ginny Thornburgh, the wife of then-Gov. Dick Thornburgh, Sica referred to Bufalino as “his friend” and asked her to help free Bufalino, whom he called an innocent man, prosecutors said.

Sica was scheduled to be arraigned later Wednesday before Dauphin County Judge Todd A. Hoover, who is overseeing the ongoing grand jury investigation. It could not immediately be determined if Sica had a lawyer.

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B16 has assigned a commission to study information on Pius XII

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Benedict XVI has established a commission to study new archival material about the papacy of Pope Pius XII and to examine how his possible beatification would impact Catholic-Jewish relations, an Italian newspaper reported. The commission “must analyze every possible repercussion, including diplomatic ones, of the beatification,” reported Andrea Tornielli in the Dec. 18 edition of Il Giornale. Tornielli, a reporter for the paper, also is the author of the 2007 book, “Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli: A Man on the Throne of Peter.” Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, the official charged with shepherding Pope Pius’ sainthood cause through its Vatican process, told Catholic News Service Dec. 19 that the commission’s work “has nothing to do with the merits of the cause; it is a diplomatic matter.”

We’ve got a new blog here on the StBlogs.com network!  Tim is a college freshman I know who’s discerning a calling to the priesthood…and I finally convinced him to start his own blog!  Check out Thoughts From Discernment.

Here’s one I am confident we’ll be hearing about on the talk shows soon. A high school teacher in Ohio decided to have her students take on Latino roles (this is a Spanish language class by the way – white students learning to speak Spanish.)

Try it legally, Erica Vieyra told her 40 senior Spanish students at Olentangy Liberty High School. Fill out the correct documents, follow the proper steps. And then, after they spent days completing the actual paperwork from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, she took out her red ink pad and stamped a big, fat DENIED across every request.

Because we know that’s what happens to every single one. That’s why no one has legally entered the USA in 3 decades. /sarcasm .

Now, she told the students, come illegally. Forge your documents, find a way across the border. Then, research real ads and find a place to live in Columbus. Figure out what it would cost, how to get food. Plan how to survive.

The students had to go to real businesses and ask for Spanish-language job applications. They had to visit a bank and ask for new-account documents written in Spanish.

Brilliant. Convince them that the only way to go is to enter illegally. Most asinine of all on the part of a student and on the part of a reporter. You see, young Yana was adopted from a Russian orphanage in 1994:

“This project was about me,” Yana said. “I realized that, for a grade, I was about to re-create what my parents had to endure to give me the opportunity to live the American dream. That scared me.”

Ahh yes, I can see myriad similarities between a person illegally entering this country and attempting to survive on their own, and a set of US citizens who are wanting to adopt and raise a 5-year-old. /sarcasm.

And of course, no article would be complete without an obvious lie:

This is the fifth year that Vieyra has assigned this project to students in her Spanish V class. Each year someone, a teacher perhaps, maybe just a friend, cringes: “They say, ‘That’s such a hot topic. Are you sure you want to go there?’ “
She always answers yes. But she cautions that the point isn’t to sway the students, only to teach them a little empathy.

Teaching a little empathy by convincing them that entering illegally is the only way to enter? I think not. Lord help me if I am that naive.

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*standard disclaimer: I am not in favor of imprisoning or deporting all illegal immigrants; I am not opposed to immigration; I am not in favor of treating illegals as less than human; I am strongly in favor of reforming our immigration system, of building a wall to keep illegals out, and of treating illegals who break further laws being instantly booted out of the country.