News

ORGANIZED CRIME FIGURE JOHN GOTTI DENIED CATHOLIC FUNERAL Catholic News Service reports that the Diocese of Brooklyn announced June 12 that John J. Gotti, the organized crime figure who died June 10 at the age of 61, could not have a funeral Mass. In a one-sentence statement, the diocesan chancellor, Father Andrew J. Vaccari, said, “The diocese has decided that there can be a Mass for the dead sometime after the burial of John Gotti.” Meanwhile, militantly pro-abortion Catholic politicians, responsible for huge numbers of deaths, continue to receive elaborate Catholic funerals.

OPINION ON THE SURREY SCHOOL BOARD CASE Ian Hunter, a pro-life columnist and retired professor from the U. of Western Ontario, writes in the Globe and Mail that the Surrey School Board trustees apparently had not heard of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when they tried to protect their children from being force-fed homosexual propaganda in school. “Do they not know that, in Canada, it is the courts that decide issues?” writes Hunter. “Given the Supreme Court of Canada’s track record, it would be reasonable to suspect that the decision will prove a landmark on the road to the secular society…” (Globe and Mail, June 13, 2002)