Free Republic

The crisis in the Catholic Church in Germany declared itself 45 years ago with the “Königsteiner Erklärung,” a declaration of the bishops regarding Humanae Vitae in 1968. Therein they toned down the Church’s teaching, leaving it up to the conscience of individuals to decide whether to use contraception or not. The Austrian bishops did the same in the “Mariatroster Erklärung.” In 2008 therefore, Cardinal Schönborn, the head of the Austrian bishops’ conference, spoke about this as the “sin of the European episcopate.” These declarations have set the tone for the decades to come, and the faithful have in consequence become...

The head of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has denounced Vatican II, described the post-conciliar liturgy as “evil,” and said that he is grateful the group never reached an accommodation with the Holy See. In a provocative address to the Kansas City audience, Bishop Bernard Fellay said: “It is has never been our intention to pretend either that the Council would be considered as good, or the New Mass would be ‘legitimate.’” He said that although the Novus Ordo Mass introduced after Vatican II may be valid, “The New Mass is bad, it is evil.” Bishop Fellay...

As superb look at suffering by Dr. Peter Kreeft, courtesy of Prager University. I agree with his division of suffering into what Man causes through our actions, wars are a classic example, and suffering caused by nature, the type of suffering caused by the seizure that took the life of my son Larry on May 19, 2013. He is also correct that when we complain about such suffering afflicted by nature we are appealing to a standard that presupposes a God, since nature cares not a whit about human suffering or the lack whereof. It is only by belief in...

The girl’s Muslim parents forced her into the marriage when she was fourteen. Her mother tried to put a good face on a bad situation, enticing the girl with a picture of marriage as a never-ending party: her husband, she said, would treat the girl to ice cream and lollipops and take her to movies and amusement parks. Reality turned out to be a bit different: her husband imprisoned her inside their home and forced her to watch violent videos featuring jihad attacks against soldiers from Western countries. He also raped her and beat her frequently. The girl went to...

For the past two Sundays, hundreds of Pakistanis of all faiths have formed human chains in front of churches during mass – first in Karachi, then in Lahore. This solidarity movement was launched in reaction to the terrorist attack that killed 81 worshippers at a church in Peshawar, making it the deadliest ever perpetrated against the country’s Christian minority. Militant groups linked to the Pakistani Taliban said they carried out the September 22 bomb attack in response to US-led drone strikes. Christians have been targeted for their faith before, but previous attacks have usually taken the form of mob violence...

I doubt that Pope Francis has heard of Ernie Banks, the Hall of Fame shortstop. But like “Mr. Cub,” whose love for baseball led him to exclaim “Let’s play two!” before Sunday doubleheaders in the 1950s, the pope from the end of the world seems to think that papal canonizations are better in tandem: hence the Sept. 30 announcement that Blessed John XXIII and Blessed John Paul II will be canonized together on Divine Mercy Sunday, April 27, 2014. Predictably, the decision caused some unhappiness in some quarters. Some Poles wanted John Paul II canonized by himself. Some who welcomed...

Article may not be posted per FR posting rules (Gannett). Link to the article here. Synopsis: The linkage was yet another example of an over-eager National Guard EEO briefing.

By Mary Wisniewski, Reuters Pope Francis' comments that the Catholic Church should not focus so much on homosexuality, abortion and contraception have met with strong approval from U.S. Catholics, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Friday. Sixty-eight percent of American Catholics agree with comments the Pope made to that effect in an interview published last month in the Jesuit magazine Civilta Cattolica, while 23 percent disagreed, according to the poll. There was little difference in opinion between observant and less-observant Catholics, women and men, and among age groups, the poll found. There was little difference in opinion between...

Several dozen U.S. Army active duty and reserve troops were told last week that the American Family Association, a well-respected Christian ministry, should be classified as a domestic hate group because the group advocates for traditional family values. The briefing was held at Camp Shelby in Mississippi and listed the AFA alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam. A soldier who attended the briefing contacted me and sent me a photograph of a slide show presentation that listed AFA as a domestic hate group. Under the AFA headline is...

SANTA CLARA -- A decision by Santa Clara University's president to drop health insurance coverage of elective abortions for the Catholic university's faculty and staff has triggered a serious rift at the school. Many faculty members say they were blindsided by the move at an institution that has long prided itself on open communication and governing by consensus. The thorny issue echoes a nationwide debate at Catholic universities over their institutional identities and ability to consider the convictions of those who do not identify with -- or who disagree with -- certain principles the Catholic tradition holds as central. The...

Today the lawless and lazy American victicrats hide behind the title "the poor". These individuals masquerade as victims and seek sympathy from the American people so they can pursue their narcissistic ambitions. The TRUTH and REALITY of this matter is that these have reaped upon themselves the horrific consequences of their LAWLESS and LAZY lifestyles (Rom. 1:18-32, Gal. 6:7). These masses have been oppressed by their compounded acts of lawlessness and violence and are never held responsible or accountable to society by the Left and Moderates in Washington. Those who try to overcome this decadent and lawless social wasteland and...

The Virgin of the Navigators is an alterpiece painted in 1536 by Alejo Fernandez for the chapel at the House of Trade in Seville. Under the protection of the Virgin are depicted King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and, kneeling on the viewer’s right are Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and one of the Pinzon Brothers. In the background are gathering the peoples of the New World. The painting was made five years after the appearance of Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico in 1531, and I wonder if word of this miracle had made...

Most mainstream media stories about women in the growing skeptic/secularist/science education movement (the boundaries between the three are pretty porous) usually begin with articles and videos asking, "Where are all the women?" But people within these circles know that there are actually a lot of female leaders, and the real woman problem is sexual harassment. As Rebecca Watson, a major writer and speaker on the skeptic/atheist circuit wrote in Slate last year, the amount of sexual harassment aimed at women over even the tiniest suggestions of how to make the movement more female-friendly is absolutely stunning. ... This sort of...

More than 1.5 million people converged on the Philippine capital on Monday for a powerful Christian sect's evangelical event, causing traffic chaos that shut down large parts of the megacity. The gathering of the secretive and politically influential Iglesia ni Cristo (Church of Christ) in the historic district of Manila forced all schools and some government offices to close. See your ad here The Supreme Court, as well as some basketball games in the highly popular college league, were also suspended, while Manila's governing authority urged private employers to give their staff a paid day off to avoid the traffic....

"Technocracy is nothing new. It hasn’t just come up in the last two decades. It has been around for the last 400 years. Technocracy is a very strange animal, it has many different facets. It has a very colorful history. It’s very difficult to actually define it, however, the main idea behind Technocracy is that it is a political as well as an economic system. As a political system, it is a pure dictatorship, it is a pure totalitarian system. Those who rule in a technocracy are not democratically elected politicians, they are appointed in some way, or they appoint...

The atheist community hailed last year’s scientific confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, for which the British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs was co-recipient this past week of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Higgs had theorized, all the way back in 1964, that there must be something that gives subatomic particles their mass, which enables them to form atoms, which, in turn, form molecules, all of which is integral to creation as we know it. That something turned out to be the Higgs boson. And its discovery, declared Dan Barker, co-president of the so-called Freedom From Religion Foundation, an...

“. . . life is an unending dialogue between a knight of the spirit who is ever striving to soar aloft, and a squire who clings to his master and strives with might and main to keep his feet firmly planted on the ground.” - Walter Starkie (1)Miguel de Cervantes, who would one day write the great novel, Don Quixote, was born in 1547 in Spain. His family had at one time held influence in society, but by the time Cervantes was born, his father was poor and often had to travel in search of work. After studying under the...

A city mayor in Spain has refused to bow to intimidation by Muslims in response to the breaking up of property illegally being used as a mosque. The city offered another property to Muslims for religious properties, but was refused."The rules of the city and the country are mandatory for everyone, and Mollet del Vallès will be uncompromising toward any kind of radicalism or blackmail." — Josep Monràs, Mayor of Mollet del Vallès, Spain Police in Spain have forcibly removed Muslim activists from an illegal mosque in a small town in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern Spain that is...

(CNSNews.com) – European lawmakers this month will vote on a measure that promotes abortion as a fundamental human right, while taking aim at the conscientious objection rights of pro-life doctors and health workers. Critics see the move as an attempt to dictate abortion policy to individual European Union governments, despite an acknowledgement by leading E.U. institutions that there is no consensus on the matter across the 28 member-states. The controversial draft report, which is being promoted by socialist members of the European Parliament (MEPs), was passed last month by the legislature’s committee on women’s rights and gender equality. According to...

You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it. You drench its furrows and level its ridges; you soften it with showers and bless its crops. You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance. The grasslands of the desert overflow; the hills are clothed with gladness. The meadows are covered with flocks and the valleys are mantled with grain; they shout for joy and sing. (Psalm 65:9-13)

Hazelmary and Peter Bull Hazelmary and Peter Bull are taking their case to the U.K. Supreme Court this week. At a time when so many of our Christian leaders are guilty of compromising the gospel before the media, dishonoring the Lord as they try to make God’s Word palatable to the world, it was an older British woman—nearly 70 and the owner of a bed-and-breakfast—who displayed a backbone of steel, a deep and consistent faith, and a theological clarity while being grilled on national TV. Cheers for Hazelmary Bull! Hazelmary and her husband, Peter, already in his 70s, owned and...

This billboard is turning a few heads in Texas: A billboard showing a tattooed Jesus Christ has stirred up quite a bit of buzz in the heart of the Bible Belt.The ad, which is the work of the website Jesustattoo.org, popped up along a West Lubbock, Texas, highway, and it’s got people talking. It shows a man, ostensibly Jesus Christ, with outstretched arms tattooed with such words as “Outcast,” “Addicted, “Jealous.”“I don’t like the picture. I think it’s very derogatory,” a local-area resident told the CBS affiliate KEYE-TV.On the website, a video casts Jesus as a tattoo artist and shows...

Next week is the author’s 35-year reunion at Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. What follows is adapted from the commencement address he gave to Gorman’s 2011 graduates.   Although I have learned many lessons since I graduated in 1978, there are three that I wish I had fully grasped when I was your age. First, be intellectually serious about your faith.  Bishop Gorman is a Catholic high school, which means that it is tethered to a rich intellectual tradition, one that has been, and is, the home of some of the greatest thinkers the world has ever...

A nasty Norwegian diplomat at the UN frequently badmouths the Holy See. He wonders why Holy See diplomats are allowed into the room during negotiations. He says outright that the Holy See ought to leave. This has happened more than once.It’s amusing a Norwegian would say such a thing. The development of Norway is rather murky and it is hard to figure when Norway really became Norway. Norwegians might claim it was when Harald Fairhair unified disparate tribes and clans in 872 after the Battle of Hafrsfjord. Even so, it is questionable when the people living there began to...

My friends know that I appreciate candor, and that I can be frank to a fault. I don’t tolerate it well when everyone in the room is desperately trying to ignore the proverbial eight-hundred pound gorilla sitting in the corner. Author Sherry Weddell does not tolerate this well either. And she would like us – “active” and presumably committed Catholics, lay, religious, consecrated and clergy – to focus on one rather large gorilla sitting in the corner of our contemporary Church: the reality that a disturbingly large proportion of Church-going Catholics fail to live as disciples of Jesus – as...

Welcome homosexual people to fellowship with your congregation, but be very careful how you show them the “love of Christ.” If you welcome them into church membership and/or give them leadership positions of any kind while they are still living a homosexual lifestyle, you will be, in effect, affirming and endorsing their lifestyle and helping them along a path that can only result in their spending their eternity in hell. (1 Corinthians 6:9). How is that showing them the “love of Christ”, who died to save them from their sins, not to save them and their sins?

I, perhaps like you, have to see folks I love and care about through some difficult periods in their life. One neighbor and parishioner just lost her eight year old daughter to cancer. A number of parishioners are seeking work and praying daily for it, but no work offers seem forth-coming. Still others cry out for the alleviation of any number of different crosses. I too have lots of things for which I pray, and sometimes I get discouraged or even angry when God seems to say, “no� or, “wait.� One thing I have surely learned about true prayer, and...

On Oct. 19, self-professed Biblical scholar Joseph Atwill is planning to make public some very flammable allegations. At a day-long symposium called "Covert Messiah" in London, England, he's set to unveil purported evidence that Roman aristocrats manufactured Jesus Christ - a claim that, if substantiated, would devalue the core of the Christian faith. The only problem? Most Biblical experts disagree with the scholar's pronouncements. A press release announcing the purported new evidence claims that Atwill has discovered "ancient confessions" that purportedly prove that Romans invented Jesus Christ in the first century. He has long argued that the faith system was...

It is axiomatic in physics that opposite charges attract one another and like charges repel. If a human analog were in operation, then one would expect the extreme left wing and the extreme right wing in the Church to be hopelessly in love. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the disdain approaches rabid levels between the two. As is so often the case, the laws of nature are very much in force, though the appearance may suggest otherwise.It isn’t that the extreme left and extreme right of the Catholic Church are different. It is the case that they...

Global Rosary at the National Shrine The Basilica of the National Shrine will join Marian Shrines from around the world in praying the Rosary live via satellite on Saturday, October 12, 2013, at 1:00pm. Come pray the Rosary and take part in this live worldwide broadcast event. The afternoon will begin with a welcome message from Pope Francis and will include the arrival of the original statue of Our Lady of Fatima to the Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love in Rome. Other participating Shrines include Our Lady of Lourdes in France, Our Lady of Czestochowa in Poland, Our...

The longer I write the more I realize how much writing is like prayer. Writing is something that connects me with God and allows me to hear His voice. Like prayer, writing is a habit that has to be developed over time and like prayer sometimes it doesn’t come easily. Both actions are disciplines of the spirit and both can help us to grow in holiness. Being holy means being the person God intends you to be. Writing helps me to use a gift He gave me and to use it to glorify Him. Like prayer, writing requires preparation and...

There’s an odd backwards moral reasoning to which our modern age seems particularly susceptible. Surely you’ve heard it: Y does X. Y is a basically good person. Therefore, X must be okay. You hear it from all sides of the cultural divide. “Joe and Fred are married. They’re good people. How can you say that that kind of relationship is wrong?” “Cindy does that. She’s a good person. So how can that be racist?” Think back a bit, and you’ll see that a huge number of the casually-made moral arguments one hears these days boil down to this. There are...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)The federal shutdown has found its angry prophet. Senate Chaplain Barry Black is usually a calm, pastoral presence on Capitol Hill, doling out spiritual wisdom and moral counsel to his high-powered flock. But the Seventh-Day Adventist and former Navy rear admiral is mad as hell about the shutdown — and he’s letting the Senate, and the Lord, know about it. “Lord, when the federal shutdown delays payments of death benefits to the families of (soldiers) dying on far-away battlefields, it’s time for our lawmakers to say enough is enough,” Black said in his prayer opening the Senate on Wednesday. “Cover...

New York magazine’s fascinating interview with Justice Antonin Scalia offers much to enjoy, and as Joe Carter has already pointed out, one of the more striking exchanges centers on the existence of the Devil.When asked whether he has “seen evidence of the Devil lately,” Scalia offered the following: You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore…What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful...

There is something strange going on in the Vatican by Hilary White, Rome Correspondent Mon Oct 07, 2013 18:28 EST ROME, October 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – I don’t know if I’m the only one to have noticed, but there seems to be something strange going on in the Vatican. No, I’m not talking about all that, at least not directly. I’m talking about the strange, long, almost awkward and, dare I say it, embarrassed silence, that has reigned from the Vatican’s press office on all of Pope Francis’s extraordinary statements and actions since his election. I’m not going to go...

(CNN) - As the Supreme Court begins its new term Monday, the devil is not on the docket – but the Evil One apparently is on the mind of Justice Antonin Scalia.New York magazine has published a fascinating new interview with Scalia in which the outspoken jurist tackled a number of topics. But none seemed to surprise Scalia's interviewer, Jennifer Senior, more than his views on Satan.The interview was conducted on September 26, the 27th anniversary of Scalia's swearing-in as a justice on the high court. He is one of a record six Catholic justices on the Supreme Court.After Scalia...

KRET KROT, Vietnam — A year ago in this poor hill-tribe village, police rounded up members of a small Catholic sect who were accused of trying to create an independent state. The leaders are in jail, followers who escaped have fled into the jungle and officers patrolling the muddy streets warn people to shun that offshoot of the faith. But the crackdown didn't affect activities at the village's church — actually an old lady's house with a white cross fixed to a corrugated iron wall — or a larger church a short hike away, where priests teach young boys math...

I leave it to those trained in such things to assess the reliability of the recent Quinnipiac poll purporting to show American Catholics favoring, roughly 2 to 1, same-sex marriage and women priests. It did not surprise me that the poll indicates greater support for same-sex marriage and women priests among older Catholics, i.e., the generation ‘catechized’ (I use the term loosely) during the worst of the post-Conciliar confusion. But whatever the etiology of such news, I write to suggest that those numbers, if they are even close to correct, portend a true crisis for millions of American Catholics.That God...

(Salt Lake City, UT) — A group of activist women seeking access to the Priesthood Session at the 183rd Semiannual General Conference were turned away. The 200 women are part of a group called Ordain Women, which is lobbying the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to allow for the ordination of women. A BYU graduated founded the group last year after returning from a mission to Barcelona.

It is almost a quarter of a century since she first sang Like A Prayer. But it seems the intervening years have done little to help Madonna decide exactly who she’s praying to. For it appears the queen of re-invention may be on the verge of one of her most startling changes yet, after she revealed she was studying the Koran. The 55-year-old was raised a Roman Catholic, but for the past 17 years she has been a devout follower of Kabbalah, a mystical offshoot of Judaism. Now the singer, whose current partner is a Muslim, has begun investigating Islam....

<p>An extremely rare convergence this year of Thanksgiving and the start of Hanukkah has created a frenzy of Talmudic proportions.</p> <p>There's the number crunching: The last time it happened was 1888, or at least the last time since Thanksgiving was declared a federal holiday by President Lincoln, and the next time may have Jews lighting their candles from spaceships 79,043 years from now, by one calculation.</p>

To follow the news today is to get the impression that public life, in the sense of rational discussion oriented toward some reasonable understanding of the common good, has come to an end. Everyone notices the partisanship, the bad faith, the indifference to truth, and the substitution of entertainment for hard news. Catholics in particular notice the disappearance of natural law reasoning, even in the informal everyday form that had always upheld principles such as the natural family and the protection of unborn children. The dominant view seems to be that things mean whatever those with position and power can...

One of the most overlooked facts of the American Civil War Era is the sympathy the South gained from Europe's most influential monarch - the pope of Rome. Pope Pius IX never actually signed any kind of alliance or 'statement of support' with the Confederate States of America, but to those who understand the nuance of papal protocol, what he did do was quite astonishing. He acknowledged President Jefferson Davis as the "Honorable President of the Confederate States of America." News of this reached the North, and the Whitehouse was considerably irate about it, prompting a response from the Vatican...

Rabbi Chain Ovadia Yosef, unarguably the greatest Sephardi Torah sage and one of the most influential political leaders of the past 40 years, died in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital Monday after several months of deteriorating health. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected at his funeral, which will begin at 6 p.m. (11 a.m. EDT) at the Porat Yosef Yeshiva and he will be buried in the cemetery at Sanhedria in Jerusalem. Several main streets will be closed.

Sean O'Malley is not only the lone American on the Council of Cardinals, but he’s also the lone Franciscan Pope Francis made a historic visit to Assisi on Oct. 4, in part to meet the Franciscans responsible for keeping alive the spiritual legacy of his namesake. Yet it may actually have been a Franciscan the pontiff brought with him who has the greatest imprint on his papacy.  The pope was flanked throughout the day by eight prelates who make up his “Council of Cardinals,” recently formalized by a chirograph as the pope’s most important sounding board, who had just wrapped up...

Global warming and Catholicism do not mix. If you do not agree with this, you could be right. In either case, however, there is nothing we can do about it. ... Let me be clear on a few points to get started. First, I love nature and the environment. In addition, I am completely against pollution (air, water, noise, light, etc.) of every kind. I also believe in environmental responsibility. ... However, to return to the primary thesis that Catholicism leaves very little room for the belief that humans can have a significant impact on global warming. Even if I...

After the Vatican recently hosted several international conferences on the environment and environmental problems, headlines reported that the Catholic Church is finally jumping on the environmental bandwagon. They were wrong on two counts. First, Catholic teaching has long been that care for the earth is both a duty that we owe to God and a reflection of our respect for each other. So, the Church isn't some Johnny-come-lately to protecting the planet. Second, the Church's understanding of what it means to be a good steward is not precisely in line with the thinking of many modern environmentalists. Subdue the Earth...

For 15 years, Heather Ann Clement was a faculty member at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school in Southern California. But that changed last month, with the start of Azusa’s new academic year, when Heather came out as a transgender. The professor of theology began referring to herself as Heath Adam Ackley. And she even started to develop a more masculine appearance. The professor of theology formerly known as Heather demanded that Azusa officially recognize “his” new name and gender change. So university administrators sat the prof down for several “thoughtful conversations.” After hearing out Heather/Heath, it was abundantly...