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Sources inside the Vatican suggest that Pope Francis aims to end Pope Benedict XVI’s universal permission for priests to say the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), also known as the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. While the course of action would be in tune with Pope Francis’ repeatedly expressed disdain for the TLM especially among young people, there has been no open discussion of it to date. Sources in Rome told LifeSite last week that liberal prelates inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith were overheard discussing a plan ascribed to the Pope to do away with Pope Benedict’s famous...

Rome, Italy, Jun 25, 2016 / 06:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- What is Benedict XVI's own view of his historical resignation? What has the fall-out been from his secretary Archbishop Georg Gänswein's controversial remark on an “expanded petrine office”? What about the “Prophesy of Malachy,” which allegedly sees Francis as the last pontiff? In a recent and candid conversation, veteran journalist and EWTN Rome correspondent Paul Badde sat down with Archbishop Gänswein, who gave his take on these and a number of other questions. The German archbishop currently serves Pope Francis as Prefect of the Papal Household, and has also maintained...

During his recent presentation of the book Beyond the Crisis in the Church: The Pontificate of Benedict XVI, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, who serves as personal secretary to “Pope Emeritus” Benedict XVI, inexplicably and quite mysteriously provided new depth, and thus new impetus, to the novel idea that Benedict’s renunciation of the papacy was qualified by a “changed understanding” of the papacy, according to which Benedict retained a “passive” aspect of the Petrine office while turning over its active exercise to Francis. In the course of the book presentation Ganswein made remarks that surely reflect Benedict’s own understanding of his situation,...

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate. Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those...

In 1977, a frail, reluctant, 50-year-old college teacher was pressed by his confessor to accept appointment as Bishop of Munich. The job would take him from his beloved students and embroil him in ecclesial and political struggles for which he had little taste. Reluctantly, that good scholar, Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, accepted the appointment.Unnoticed by most people, on the coat of arms that he created for his service as bishop Fr. Ratzinger included a puzzling symbol: a bear with a pack on its back.Just four years later, Pope John Paul II summoned Bishop Ratzinger to Rome. There, for a quarter of...

The Gospel from Monday the second week of Advent is the gospel of the paralyzed man who is lowered through the roof. It is presented to us in Advent because, among the many prophecies about the Messiah, would be that the lame would walk. But the Gospel also helps us to focus on Jesus’ central mission for us, and it is very provocatively expressed in this Gospel.The Gospel passage contains a rather peculiar and somewhat awkward moment. Jesus looks at a paralyzed man and says to him, As for you, your sins are forgiven (Lk 5:20). What a strange thing...

Much as last weekend's events highlighted the reality in the elevation of the two youngest members – by far – of the Pope's Senate (and, in time, the electorate that'll choose his successor), a 2010 analysis long ago set the stakes for what's now upon us.... Already, in the red hats he doled out in March 2006 and November 2007, the pontiff has named thirty -- that is, at least a quarter of his successor’s eventual electorate -- so restoring the “papal senate” to its voting maximum would give Papa Ratzinger 42% of “his” cardinals in the electoral college, the...

April 5, 2012 Pope Denounces Dissident Priests VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI denounced priests who have questioned church teaching on celibacy and ordaining women, saying Thursday they were disobeying his authority to try to impose their own ideas on the church. Pope Benedict made the rare and explicit criticism from the altar of St. Peter's Basilica in his homily on Holy Thursday, when priests recall the promises they made when ordained. In 2006, a group of Austrian priests launched the Pfarrer Initiative, or pastor initiative, a call to disobedience aimed at abolishing priestly celibacy and opening up the clergy...

People who have spent time with him recently say they found him weaker than they'd ever seen him, seemingly too tired to engage with what they were saying. He no longer meets individually with visiting bishops. A few weeks ago he started using a moving platform to spare him the long walk down St. Peter's Basilica.

There is one front page news story that will certainly not go unnoticed: that is, that the Pope is thinking about resigning during the Spring of 2012. Journalist Antonio Socci has confirmed the same in the Italian daily, Libero.  "For now,” Socci writes, “he is saying that this may be true (Joseph Ratzinger’s personal assumption), but I hope the story does not reach the news. But this rumor is circulating high up in the Vatican and therefore deserves close attention. The Pope has not rejected the possibility of his resignation when he turns 85 in April next year.”  Socci recalls...

<p>SINEAD O'Connor sparked widespread anger today after suggesting she would shoot the Pope.</p>

Pope Benedict XVI / Photo Credit Mazur Vatican City, May 13, 2011 / 10:55 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Local dioceses should give a “generous welcome” to any laity who wish to attend Mass in the “extraordinary form” and to priests who wish to say it.  That’s the key message of new Vatican guidelines regarding the extraordinary form of the Mass – often popularly referred to as the “Tridentine Mass” or “old Latin Mass.” The “extraordinary form” is the rite of Mass contained within the Roman Missal which was universally used from 1570 to 1962. It was almost always celebrated in...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Catholic Online) - Catholics, other Christians, other people of faith and people of good throughout the world continue to mourn and reflect upon the brutal killing of Catholics at Holy Mass in Baghdad last Sunday. However, those associated with the Muslim extremists who perpetrated the evil act continue to spew their hateful and violent rhetoric. We are committed to updating our global readers on the unfolding danger that these threats portend against Catholics and other Christians. Serious times demand a serious response. Asia News has provided excellent coverage of the massacre and its aftermath. On November 3, they...

The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI has received a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Vatican did not release the contents of the message. But the website of the Iranian presidency said Saturday that Ahmadinejad had called for cooperation by "divine religions" against secularism.

VATICAN CITY - Gay groups and politicians condemned Pope Benedict's number two on Wednesday for calling homosexuality a "pathology" and linking it directly to sexual abuse of children. The comments made by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone during a visit to Chile, and the controversy they caused, were splashed on mainstream Italian newspapers on Wednesday. The French foreign ministry and some Catholic blogs that support the pope also condemned the cardinal's remarks.

Gay rights groups have condemned the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, for claiming that the Catholic church's sexual abuse crisis was linked to homosexuality and paedophilia and not celibacy among priests.Bertone, who is considered Pope Benedict's number two, sparked the controversy on a visit to Chile when he suggested gay sexuality was to blame for the church's child abuse scandals.Homosexual associations in Italy reacted with anger and indignation. The biggest group, Arcigay, called the cardinal's words "shocking and irresponsible". The president of the gay media service, Gaynet, said if senior church officials "feel constrained to dump the blame...

Having criticized particular Catholic cardinals for blaming everything–including the Church’s sex scandal–on “the Jews”, let me now come to the defense of the Pope and of the Church itself on this issue. To begin with, this is an extraordinarily complex problem, because the Church has at least five important traditions that make it difficult to move quickly and aggressively in response to complaints of abuse. The first tradition involves confidentiality, particularly not exclusively the confidentiality of the priest with regard to the penitent. But there is also a wider spread tradition of confidentiality within the Church hierarchy itself. Second, there...

...of laicizing two priests after lengthy canonical trials right in the middle of pushing to streamline a complex Vatican bureaucracy so as to facilitate more speedy outcomes. Per Fr. Z: •Again, the abuse took place decades ago.•He was suspended.•There was a canonical trial.It was referred to Rome, the CDF, because it concerned a case of the confessional. •It was determined that he should be dismissed from the clerical state.•The priest appealed.•The appeal process was drawn out for several years because the laws and canonical process of these clerical cases was being overhauled.•Card. Ratzinger was the one who led the...

LOS ANGELES – The head of a Roman Catholic order that specialized in the treatment of pedophile priests visited with the then-pope nearly 50 years ago and followed up with a letter recommending the removal of pedophile priests from ministry, according to a copy of the letter released Wednesday. In the Aug. 27, 1963 letter, the head of the New Mexico-based Servants of the Holy Paraclete tells the pope he recommends removing pedophile priests from active ministry and strongly urges defrocking repeat offenders. The letter, written by the Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald, appears to have been drafted at the request...

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in...