Free Republic

LONDON (CNS) -- Catholic officials have applied for permission to exhume the body of a 19th-century cardinal whose cause for sainthood is expected to soon progress to beatification. They want to transfer the remains of Cardinal John Henry Newman from a grave in a small cemetery in the suburbs of Birmingham, England, to a marble sarcophagus in a church in the city where they can be venerated by pilgrims. A July 14 statement said that the Archdiocese of Birmingham was now in direct contact with the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Sir Suma Chakrabarti, to obtain the necessary...

SYDNEY, Australia (CNS) -- For some participants at World Youth Day, the joy of welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to the World Youth Day celebration July 17 was dampened by the absence of a Chaldean Catholic delegation from Iraq. Salina Hasham, a World Youth Day employee, has been working for months trying to get the 170-member Iraqi delegation to Sydney. At first, it seemed the Australian government would not issue any visas to the group, Hasham said. Then 10 visas were granted and, finally, a total of 25 visas were approved. But as of July 17, she said, "they are stuck...

When he was a state senator in Illinois in June 2002, Barack Obama was explicitly asked by Chicago media personality Jeff Berkowitz whether he supports school vouchers. “I would support anything that is going to be better for the children of Illinois,” he said. He emphatically added that “I am not closed minded on the issue.” In February 2008, Obama spoke to reporters from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the issue. Still keeping an open mind, he said, “If there was any argument for vouchers, it was ‘Let’s see if the experiment works.’ And if it does, whatever my preconception,...

Two Catholic priests in China's "underground" church have been detained for over a month after trying to join a pilgrimage, an overseas group said, as the government seeks to quell protest threats before the Olympics. Zhang Jianlin and Zhang Li, priests from near Zhangjiakou city in Hebei province, next to Beijing, sought to join thousands of other Catholics on the annual pilgrimage on May 24 to the Our Lady of Sheshan shrine near Shanghai, the Connecticut-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said in an email on Monday. "Both priests disappeared while they were in the hands of Chinese authorities," said the Foundation,...

In his column of June 24, Wall Street Journal writer William McGurn looked at the mostly NARAL-friendly Catholics named to the Obama campaign’s National Catholic Advisory Council. Noting that Obama enjoys a NARAL approval rating of 100%, and that — while in the Illinois State Senate — he voted against a measure similar in intent to the unanimously approved 2002 Federal Born Alive Act, McGurn wonders how the council and other Catholics for Obama can rationalize support for a candidate who stands in such profound contrast to the church’s firm teaching that abortion is “an intrinsic evil.” The…line of argument...

SYDNEY, Australia -- Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Australia on Sunday, saying he wants to use his visit to raise awareness about global warming and address the crisis of clergy sexual abuse. Benedict suggested to reporters on the flight from the Vatican that he would express regret about abuse by priests, though victims' groups are demanding he go further and make a direct formal apology. The clergy abuse scandal is a serious note in the pope's 10-day visit to Australia, his first, during which he will join the World Youth Day festival that has attracted more than 200,000 people. Benedict,...

SYDNEY, Australia -- Pope Benedict XVI arrived in Australia on Sunday, saying he wants to use his visit to raise awareness about global warming and address the crisis of clergy sexual abuse. Benedict suggested to reporters on the flight from the Vatican that he would express regret about abuse by priests, though victims' groups are demanding he go further and make a direct formal apology. The clergy abuse scandal is a serious note in the pope's 10-day visit to Australia, his first, during which he will join the World Youth Day festival that has attracted more than 200,000 people. Benedict,...

The Catholic League has launched a campaign to bring public scorn on a University of Minnesota-Morris teacher who threatened to treat a consecrated communion wafer, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ, "with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse." To which the professor in question, Paul Zachary Myers, responded: "Scumbags." The issue arose over an argument that didn't even involve Myers. As WND reported, a student at the University of Central Florida reported getting death threats after he stole and later returned a wafer from a Catholic Mass in Orlando.

Yesterday, Catholic League president Bill Donohue issued a news release calling attention to the plea that Paul Zachary Myers made on his blog: he solicited the Communion Host for the express purpose of desecrating it. Donohue now responds to the reaction he has received from the University of Minnesota Morris professor, as well as others: “Myers went on Houston radio station KPFT last night saying that Bill Donohue has ‘declared a fatwa’ against him. He should know better—I don’t need others to do the fighting for me. I’m quite good at it myself. But he’d better be careful what he...

Speaking Well of the Dead Crisis November 1997 Fr. George William Rutler 0n July 29, 1997, a representative philosophe of our abortion culture, retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, was lavishly eulogized in St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where the Requiem Mass for President Kennedy had been sung in 1963. Richard Cardinal Cushing was relatively constrained back then, because liturgical depredations had not yet switched into high gear. It was not thus when our president, who vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortions, was permitted to announce to all corners of the cathedral for consumption in all corners of the...

Catholic Climate Change by: Malcolm A. Kline, July 11, 2008 For many millennia, Catholic school children could find inspiration in their own names because likely they shared them with a sanctified namesake, or patron saint. St. Anthony, for example, is the patron saint of the lost and found. Now, it seems, even the saints have become political totems. “In the spirit of their founder, Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, the Franciscan Friars of Holy Name Province recognize the seriousness that the challenge of climate change presents, especially to the poor and marginalized,” the bulletin of the parish...

TORONTO, July 4, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dropped a complaint by a homosexual activist against Catholic Insight a Toronto-based national Catholic news magazine. A year and a half - and many thousands of dollars in legal fees - after a nine-point human rights complaint was filed by Edmonton-based homosexual activist Rob Wells, Catholic Insight has been informed that the case has been dropped. However, a judicial review before the Federal Court is still possible should the complainant pursue that avenue. In a letter the Commission noted that it decided "to dismiss the complaint because the...

Our Times: The Age of Martyrs by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Never in the history of the papacy has any Bishop of Rome written at greater length about martyrdom than Pope John Paul II. His encyclical The Gospel of Life devotes a thousand or more words to the call to martyrdom in our age.He reminds us that the revelation from the Old Testament to the new, and from the time of Christ to the present day, is the history of martyrdom as a witness to the truth.He names Susanna, who refused to consent to lechery and was ready to...

“John and Mary Catholic have a right to have prayer texts that are clear and understandable,” Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pennsylvania, said at this month’s meeting of the U.S. bishops. As he has done many times before, His Excellency was speaking out against a proposed English translation from Latin of the prayers of the Roman Mass. The translation would replace the current one in use in English-speaking parishes – a translation its defenders praise as clear, understandable, and “proclaimable.” Certainly, the current translation of the Mass is all these things, but it is much more besides. The translation is...

On June 3, just a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, San Francisco Catholic Charities-CYO held its 2008 Red House Fundraiser. [[SachetMiller062208.jpg]]According to the Catholic Charities-CYO web site, the annual event has been held since 2004. This year’s fundraiser, reports the site, was held “in the heart of the Castro.” The co-chairs of the event and the honorary committee members were a Who’s Who of same-sex “marriage” supporters. They included: Nanette Lee Miller, treasurer of CCCYO, who “married” another woman in 2004, yet still serves on CCCYO’s board. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who said of...

A movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s book, Angels and Demons, is now in production; it is the prequel to the film, “The Da Vinci Code.” There are reports today that the Vatican has banned those associated with “Angels and Demons” from shooting in Catholic churches in Rome or in the Vatican itself. This is important because there are scenes in the movie that are supposed to take place in the Vatican and in two churches in Rome. “Angels and Demons” stars Tom Hanks in his role as Robert Langdon, the symbologist. This time he is trying to unravel a plot...

Today, Pope Benedict XVI is welcoming a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Arranged by the Pave the Way Foundation, the group will personally thank the pope for the Catholic Church’s intervention in saving their lives in Italy during World War II. Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed this event today: “Despite attempts by embittered ex-priests and seminarians, and others, to discredit Pope Pius XII’s heroic efforts in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust (as many as 860,000 were saved), the evidence is mounting that Pius was a ‘Righteous Gentile.’ What is happening in the Vatican today is another reminder of just...

President Bush may follow in the footsteps of his brother Jeb and convert to Catholicism, several European papers are reporting. In the wake of the president’s visit to see Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, Italian newspapers, citing Vatican sources, said Bush was open to the idea of converting to Catholicism. The Italian newspaper Il Foglio referred to such talk about Bush’s possible conversion and stated that “anything is possible, especially for someone reborn like Bush.� Noting that Tony Blair converted to Catholicism after leaving office as Britain’s prime minister last year, the paper also stated that “if anything happens,...

George W Bush and Pope Benedict XVI have held an intimate meeting in Rome as rumours mounted in Italy that the president may follow in Tony Blair's footsteps and convert to Catholicism. The two men spoke for half an hour in the 12th century Tower of St John, a private area in the Vatican gardens which is used by the pope for private reflection. The usual protocol for heads-of-state is a meeting in the pope's library in the Apostolic Palace, but a spokesman for the Vatican said Benedict wanted to reward Mr Bush for the "warmth" of his reception at...

George W Bush and Pope Benedict XVI have held an intimate meeting in Rome as rumours mounted in Italy that the president may follow in Tony Blair's footsteps and convert to Catholicism. The two men spoke for half an hour in the 12th century Tower of St John, a private area in the Vatican gardens which is used by the pope for private reflection. The usual protocol for heads-of-state is a meeting in the pope's library in the Apostolic Palace, but a spokesman for the Vatican said Benedict wanted to reward Mr Bush for the "warmth" of his reception at...

A Roman Catholic adoption agency headed by Britain's most senior Catholic churchman is to defy the Government over its controversial gay equality laws. The Westminster Catholic Children's Society, whose president is Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, will ignore new rules that require it to place children with same-sex couples. While other Catholic adoption agencies are caving in to the legislation by severing their ties with the Church or even closing, the Westminster Society will continue its policy of placing children only with married heterosexuals and single people. Its stance will set the Cardinal - who welcomed Tony Blair into the Catholic Church...

Embracing Spirituality Q: “After you had a heart attack and a nervous breakdown at age 38, on the set of Apocalypse Now, you went to India and found spirituality. Is that when you embraced Catholicism?” A: “I did, yeah. I was raised Catholic, but it was a religion, not a way of life. [After the heart attack] I came back to a faith more than a church. I came back with joy and with freedom and thanksgiving rather than with fear or trembling or worrying about eternity. I decided that what I really loved the most about the faith was...

Many people believe that the great harlot that revelations talks about is the cathlic Church and that the daughters of the great harlot is the protestant churches. and that makes sense to me more than any thing else. The catholic Church has claimed to change the saboth day from the seventh day ( saterday ) to the first day ( sunday ). And of course the protestants went right along with it, have you noticed that especialy in long gone days many of the religious people worked harder and worked thier animals harder on what they called the saboth than...

“If one, because of one’s sincerely held moral beliefs, whether it be Jew, Muslim, Christian, Catholic, opposes the idea of same-sex marriage in Canada, is that considered ‘hate’?�The question was not rhetorical. Nor was it theoretical. Fr. Alphonse de Valk, a Basilian priest and pro-life activist known throughout Canada for his orthodoxy, is currently being investigated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) — a quasi-judicial investigative body with the power of the Canadian government behind it. The CHRC is using section 13 of Canada’s Human Rights Act to investigate the priest. This is a section under which no defendant...

You’ve seen the latest video rant from Trinity featuring a Catholic priest in the lead role? Apparently the guy is just what you’d expect to find in any Catholic parish [/snark]: Ambushed by a Bill O’Reilly camera crew, Pfleger stated: "He (Farrakhan) has—first of all, he has not called Judaism a gutter religion of blood suckers. That is not what he has said because I have heard that talk. I stick up for Louis Farrakhan because he is another person that the media has chosen to define how they want to do it. And they demonize how they want to...

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, who helped reignite Barack Obama's pastor problems by mocking Hillary Clinton, said this evening he's received "thousands of hate threats" since his videotaped pulpit rant. "They want to kill me," Pfleger told parishioners during a service in a St. Sabina Church chapel on Chicago's South Side this evening. "It's been very ugly." The firebrand Catholic Priest made his controversial Clinton comments last Sunday at Trinity United Church of Christ, home church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor. Pfleger mocked Clinton for crying on the campaign trail, and suggested it was "white entitlement" leading Clinton...

You can read the Tribune's Saturday editorial regarding the news surrounding Rev. Michael Pfleger here. When Barack Obama announced his campaign for president, you could anticipate that ugly racial stereotypes would rear up. You probably couldn’t anticipate that some of his strongest supporters would promote the worst of it. That’s what the nation saw as video surfaced of a sermon Rev. Michael Pfleger gave last Sunday from the pulpit of Obama’s church in Chicago. Pfleger talks of exposing “white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head, and then theatrically mocks Sen. Hillary Clinton. He stalks around the stage of...

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann, whose Roman Catholic archdiocese covers northeast Kansas, on May 9 called on Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to stop taking Communion until she disowns her support for the "serious moral evil" of abortion. That put the church in conflict with a rising star of the Democratic Party who is often described as a "moderate" and is perhaps the leading prospect to become Barack Obama's running mate. Naumann also took Sebelius to task for her veto April 21 of a bill, passed by 2 to 1 margins in both houses of the Kansas Legislature, that would strengthen the state's...

A rifleman angered by a custody dispute with his ex-girlfriend opened fire Saturday at a parish school festival in Granada Hills this morning, wounding the woman and two other fair-goers before being tackled by bystanders and arrested by an off-duty police officer, authorities said. Witnesses described scenes of terror and panic as the man nonchalantly brandished a .22-caliber rifle made to look like an M-16 assault rifle and fired into booths at the fair. The shooting took place shortly before the 11 a.m. start of the festival on a baseball field on the grounds of the St. John Baptist de...

In the aftermath of the visit by Pope Benedict XVI, a troublesome question is asked by traditional Catholics: Did American pro-choice politicians receiving Communion at the papal masses indicate a softening on the abortion question by the pope? The answer is that it did not. On the contrary, it reflected disobedience to Benedict by the archbishops of New York and Washington. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. John Kerry, Christopher Dodd and Edward M. Kennedy received Communion at Nationals Park in Washington, as did Rudolph Giuliani at Yankee Stadium in New York. They were present because they were invited to...

Fisherman’s Shoes Find Target by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 24, 2008 Despite what you may have been lead to believe by the so-called mainstream media, the Pope delivered an address to Catholic college presidents that could be summarized as My Way or The Highway. The Pope addressed the United Nations in an approach that longtime students of the UN might characterize as one of rapprochement. Nonetheless, his remarks to the college presidents, according to attendees at that meeting were, if not remonstrative, then at least reminders of the need to pass on actual Catholic teaching in universities that bear that...

Before he was elected to succeed John Paul II, the modern era's most popular pope, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI earned the nickname "the Rottweiler" for his staunch enforcement of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. But for a pope so steeped in the infallibility of the church, Benedict's visit to America this week will be remembered for his historic reaching out to the victims of the very church he leads — those thousands of children sexually molested by priests in the past five decades. His decision to focus on their pain and the church's betrayal sent a powerful message...

YOU knew he had arrived by the cheer that welled up from the street. It was electric. Suddenly inside the cathedral, where 3,000 people were waiting, it turned quiet and everyone turned. And now the great huge doors of St. Patrick's opened and sunlight poured in, crashed down, and there was the pope, and the crowd - nuns and religious, deacons and priests, meaning a lot of people who actually deserved to be there - sent a wave of applause crashing against the old Gothic dome. He reacted the way we now know Benedict does. Modest, meek, surprised by love,...

Original Free Republic LinkFree Republic:Pope Benedict XVI Pays Historical Visit To The Park Street Synagogue

I can understand why nearly three-quarters of U.S. Catholics say they approve of their new Pope, Benedict XVI. He is a deep thinking Pontiff who, like John Paul II before him, holds fast to refreshingly strong moral convictions. When he said he was ashamed of the existence of pedophile priests and their subsequent abuse of young boys, unlike the scoffers, I believe him. It’s true that many Catholic leaders, to their disgrace, ignored early reports and initiated a cover-up. If financial retribution can ever repay such betrayal, many archdioceses have been bankrupted by the scandal. The church, however slow, has...

Pope Benedict XVI paid a 22-minute visit to the Park East Synagogue — the first papal trip to a United States synagogue — on Friday afternoon. He presented the synagogue with a medieval Jewish manuscript from the Vatican library and received three gifts: a seder plate, a Passover haggadah and a box of matzoh. The pope offered warm remarks and was showered with praise and music, but in a brief, three-minute address, he did not address the Holocaust, anti-Semitism or historic tensions between Jews and the Catholic Church. The pope entered the temple As the choir sang “Sh’ma Yisrael,” a...

PAPAL PLANE (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday he was "deeply ashamed" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church and will work to make sure pedophiles don't become priests. Benedict was answering questions submitted in advance by reporters aboard a special Alitalia airliner as he was flying from Rome to Washington to begin his first papal pilgrimage to the United States. "It is a great suffering for the Church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen," Benedict said. "It is difficult for me to understand...

Cultural Crisis In American Catholicism Confronts Pope By JOHN FARMER JR.This week's visit of Pope Benedict XVI comes at a critical time in the history of Roman Catholicism in America. Rocked by the widespread abuse of children by Catholic priests, and unsettled by the death of the beloved Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church in America has been troubled, to say the least. But the church's problems run deeper even than the recent sex scandals. The church was hemorrhaging members before priest-gate, in large measure because the church and American culture are directly at odds. But just as Pope...

MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. -- For 46 years, crime, recessions and hurricanes proved no threat to the daily ritual of St. Monica School, where the entire blue-and-white uniformed student body gathered outside each morning to join in prayer. Come June, though, the tradition will fade away, and "amen" will close St. Monica's morning recitations for the last time. The school, a home-away-from-home for mostly minority students, will close. As Pope Benedict XVI next week makes his first trip to the U.S. as pontiff, Catholic schools across the country, long a force in educating the underprivileged regardless of their faith, face the...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is hard not to be sympathetic to the travails of the people of Tibet. Annexed against their will almost 60 years ago, their culture destroyed, their self-determination trampled under foot, their freedoms curtailed, and their religion mocked, Tibet is a case study of what atheists do when they get to rule. Please, recall the infamous Maoist maxim: "Religion is poison." It is the same feeling echoed by the "bright" Neo-atheists such as Dawkins, Harris, Wilson, and their sycophant followers. The difference between these and the Maoists is that the latter...

Archbishop Sheen emphasizes the role of Our Lady of Fatima with regard to the Muslims Welcome back to “What’s New” on the Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen website. In our last feature, we presented evidence of an extraordinary prophetic statement by Archbishop Sheen. (If you missed it, see the Archives.) This present feature presents his insight regarding the part Our Lady of Fatima would play in the conversion of the Muslim people. At a special “Peace Congress” in Lisbon, Portugal in 1951, Archbishop Sheen offered a new and very striking observation: “Our Lady has been chosen to be known by the...

Divorce and abortion are offences in the sight of God, Pope Benedict XVI charged Saturday, while calling on the Catholic Church to be merciful to those who had experienced such events. "The ethical judgement of the Church on divorce and abortion is clear and well-known," he told participants in a Catholic congress on marriage and the family. "They are serious offences... which violate human dignity, inflict deep injustice on human and social relations and offend God himself, guarantor of conjugal peace and origin of life," he said. However he added that there were people who had committed such "errors" but...

"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook. He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population - a stable percentage - while Muslims were at 19.2 percent. "It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer," the monsignor said. Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures...

ROME — The Vatican is negotiating with authorities in Saudi Arabia for permission to build the country's first Roman Catholic church, sources in the Holy See said yesterday. The move evidently heralds a major policy change toward the nearly 1 million Christians working in the unbendingly conservative Wahhabi kingdom. Riyadh and the Holy See have been holding discreet discussions on the sensitive issue for several weeks and the two sides are "locked together," said Archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, the papal nuncio, or Vatican ambassador, to the Persian Gulf states of Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. A source in...

In early March, the media had a field day announcing that Pope Benedict XVI had issued a list of “new sins.” As with many reports on religion, the new sins articles were slathered with self-satisfied secular glee. They were also wrong. The story started spinning when comments -- made to a group of priests by a Cardinal on the subject of hearing confessions -- were made public. The Cardinal’s goal was to underscore that moral choices were not limited to what we did when alone, but also included what we do as citizens of the world. Hence, the Cardinal’s focus...

The ranks of Sen. Barack Obama's supporters in his bid to become president of the United States have been found to include a white priest of a mostly black church who has links to Nation of Islam chief Louis Farrakhan and an apparently low level of tolerance for the 2nd Amendment. The supporter is Father Michael Pfleger, a white Roman Catholic priest of the predominantly African-American St. Sabrina Church on Chicago's South Side. Pfleger currently is listed on Obama's 2008 presidential campaign website as being one of the "people of faith" who endorse Obama's campaign. The endorsement includes a photo...

Magdi, Ayaan, Salman, and Us. Michael Ledeen March 23, 2008 My friend Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of the Italian newspaper il Corriere della Sera, has converted from Islam to Catholicism and was baptized the night before Easter in a service conducted by the pope in St. Peter’s in Rome. It’s a courageous act, but then Magdi Allam is a brave man. His outspoken criticism of Italian Muslim radicals–especially their support for the Muslim Brotherhood and for Hamas–had already produced threats to his life several years ago, and, ever since, the Italian Government has protected him, his home, and his...

A criminal investigation focusing on three Mormon missionaries who were photographed defacing a Catholic shrine has been dropped after the Catholic bishop in the San Luis Valley of Colorado where the incident happened urged forgiveness. According to reports in the Denver Post and the Pueblo Chieftain, the three missionaries had been shown in photos posted on the Internet at the Shrine of the Mexican Martyrs at the Chapel of All Saints on a butte overlooking the town of San Luis. The photographs were taken in 2006 and showed the men preaching from the Book of Mormon at the shrine's altar,...

A group of anti-war protesters interrupted an Easter Mass in Chicago yesterday, stunning parishioners with their shouts during Cardinal Francis George’s homily. They then squirted stage blood on the congregation, leading to their arrest and an angry confrontation in the gathering space outside the hall. As it turns out, the protesters not only were mostly incoherent, but also very, very late (via Memeorandum): Six people were arrested at Holy Name parish’s auditorium Sunday after disrupting an Easter mass to protest the Iraq war.The group—whose female and male members identified themselves as Catholic Schoolgirls Against the War—stood up at the beginning...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The leader of Germany's Jewish community said on Friday she was surprised Pope Benedict could have allowed a new version of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, told Reuters Television she could not fathom Pope Benedict putting forward the new decree because he experienced discrimination against Jews in Germany as a young man. "I would have assumed that this German pope, of all people, had got to know first hand the ostracizing of Jewry," she said. "I could not have imagined that this...