The sentiments expressed by the young man in that video are ones that I encountered frequently among evangelicals as I was growing up. But how sound are such sentiments? Fr. Robert Barron, a Catholic priest and leader of Word on Fire, offers some excellent feedback:

Is this insensitive?

This being an election year, we can expect to see a lot more political mudslinging in the media than we normally would. But does a cartoon such as this one cross the line? Unless you’ve been on a news blackout for the past week, you’ll immediately recognize the above cartoon as having been inspired by the luxury liner that ran aground near Italy, which resulted in several deaths (with some people still unaccounted for) and a potential ecological catastrophe as well. Is this cartoon insensitive, or a legitimate expression of someone’s political views?

A friend of mine posted this picture on Facebook, and someone immediately expressed disgust with it: “Whoever did this has no taste and certainly no respect. They’re still pulling bodies off that ship for crying out loud. There’s plenty of political cannon fodder to pick from out there… I don’t care about the political content. I care about the fact that someone is using a tragedy that’s barely a week old to make a cheap joke.” Others disagreed. For instance, one person said, “And how does this foster disrespect for the dead? I see nothing here but a representation of what we’ve seen in overdrive in the U.S. for the past 3 years…”

Your thoughts?

A convicted criminal who was serving out his sentence in a monastery has escaped for the second time and asked to be sent back to prison because life was too tough.

Thief David Catalano, 31, was sent to a Santa Maria degli Angeli community run by Capuchin monks in Sicily last November.

But he found their austere lifetstyle too tough to handle and soon escaped. After a short while on the run he was caught by police and sent back.

On Monday he fled for the second time in six weeks, only to swiftly turn himself in at a police station and beg officers to send him back to jail in the nearby town of Nicosia.

He told the stunned policemen: ‘Prison is better than being at that hostel run by monks.’

A police spokesman said: ‘Catalano arrived out of the blue and said there was no way he could stay on with the monks.

‘He said it was too tough and he wanted to go back to prison, so we happily obliged and he is now back behind bars serving the rest of his sentence.

‘Life with the monks can be pretty tough – there are no mod cons and they are up early and go to bed early. There are no luxuries at the hostel and the monks run a very austere regime.’

The Santa Maria degli Angeli community is based in a monastery near Enna on the island of Sicily.

It has been run as a halfway house by the Capuchin friars for more than 12 years with around 60 prisoners accommodated there as they near the end of their sentences.

The Capuchin order broke from the Franciscans in the 16th century, saying the order had strayed from the tough regime of founder St Francis. They formed an offshoot which focused on living an austere monastic life.

The Capuchin are named after their distinctive pointed hoods and they believe in living a simple and austere life with neither monks nor their monasteries being allowed to own property.

The monks are expected to beg and rely on charity for all of their needs, never keeping more than a few days’ worth of food at any given time.

Nobody at the Santa Maria community was available for comment.

If you ask me, what this really reveals is that we should make our prisons more like Capuchin monasteries!

Get a load of this little drummer boy:

And in keeping with a cute little cartoon I posted recently, here’s a further reminder to guard you Christmas tree from your pets:

But to show that cats can get into the Christmas spirit (and not just your Christmas tree), these little kitties want to serenade us with “Silent Night” as only they can do: