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In this episode of The Remnant Forum, Michael Matt and Christopher Ferrara break out the Catholic microscope and take a careful look at the controversial few paragraphs and footnotes of the Pope’s apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia. Is Cardinal Raymond Burke a troublemaker? Is Francis merely attempting to be pastoral? Merciful? At the heart of all of this are the words of Jesus Christ which forbid adultery WITH NO EXCEPTIONS. Trouble is, Francis wants exceptions. Does this mean that Christ the Judgmental must bow to Francis the Merciful? Is this the 21st century’s version of the Arian Crisis?

t seems another prelate has abandoned his post. In an interview on January 8, Gerhard Cardinal Mueller, prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, rejected making any correction of Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia, effectively joining some of his fellow German cardinals in a slight to Cardinal Burke and his three colleagues. The very title of the congregation which this cardinal heads implies the importance of the office and its crucial role — especially as it relates to the current situation with the four cardinals and the dubia. Cardinal Mueller’s words in this interview are a critical blow...

On August 23rd, 1973, four bank workers in Stockholm, Sweden, were taken hostage at gunpoint by Jan-Erik Olsson, a career criminal who was later joined by a friend of his from prison. After six days — during which the captives were treated harshly, terrified, strapped with dynamite, and kept in a vault — the standoff ended and the hostages were released. But then, something strange happened. Dr. Joseph Carver, a clinical psychologist, describes what came next: After their rescue, the hostages exhibited a shocking attitude considering they were threatened, abused, and feared for their lives for over five days. In...

Some make the mistake, often intentionally, that Islam means "peace." It does not. It means submission. The same false religion that spawns such submission is now dominant in our the Church of Christ under the Peronist thug now sitting in the Chair of Peter. Aided and abetted by his mathematically and theologically deficient Jesuitical sycophant. Antonio Spadaro, who is so tough, he blocks people on Twitter, these three amigos, which include the official interpreter of Amoris Laetitia, Cardinal Schönborn, are ramping up the demand that Catholics submit to their pathetical and filthy heresies. Submission. They want you to believe that...

All through the modern era, the primary accusation against Catholicism was its clarity, its being too sure of what reason and revelation meant. It was arrogant. Imagine her claiming that she had a handle on essential truths! What angered people was not the fact that the Church did not know what she was talking about, but the fact that she did and claimed that she did. People were comfortable with doubt. Doubt makes you free, not truth! Doubt leaves a lot of leeway. People claimed to be scandalized by certitude. To bring the Church into the modern world meant enticing,...

According to Stanze Vaticane, the blog for the Italian TV channel TGCom24, Card. Gerhard Ludwig Müller has rejected any correction of Pope Francis concerning those explosive sections of Amoris Laetitia (especially Chapter 8, ¶¶ 302-305) which prompted the four cardinals to present their dubia to Pope Francis. Those passages of Amoris clearly open the door to Holy Communion for the divorced and “remarried” in “certain cases” — as bishop after bishop is now declaring — while appearing to reduce exceptionless negative precepts of the natural law (including “Thou shalt not commit adultery”) to “general rules” and mere “objective ideals” rather...

MJM: I want to address the 900-pound gorilla in the room—the controversy surrounding Pope Francis’s post-Synodal exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (AL). The document, especially Paragraph 305, has been described by various priests and theologians, you know on EWTN and elsewhere, as “dangerous,” “very disturbing,” “very problematic,” “a big mistake,” “a direct contradiction of Pope John Paul's Familiaris Consortio,” and so forth. First of all, Your Eminence, how authoritative is AL, and are we talking merely about scandal here, or do these problematic paragraphs savor of heresy?

Cardinal Gerhard Müller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in a live television interview on Sunday that a “fraternal correction” of Pope Francis regarding his apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) is “not possible at this time” because the document poses “no danger to the faith.”

Father Antonio Spadaro, the Italian Jesuit who has been identified as “the Pope’s mouthpiece,” frequently uses his Twitter account(s) to belittle all those who have questions about Amoris Laetitia. But this gem from yesterday might have a boomerang effect: >>Theology is no #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people…<< This is wrong, and wrong in revealing ways. Is Spadaro suggesting that when we speak about “real life,” the rules of scientific logic don’t apply? Imagine how you would feel if someone said: “You can talk all...

Virtually every priest who has worked in Africa knows that this is a serious pastoral issue Every now and then someone says something interesting on Twitter. Just yesterday Cardinal Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, reminded us all of something we ought not to forget. (see post below) Cardinal Napier describes a real and pressing question: polygamy is widespread in Africa, and Catholics in the West cannot ignore this. Catholic teaching and practice must be such that they are able to be inculturated in a wide variety of settings. An initiative might go down well in Berlin or Vienna, but how...

Remember him? It's Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, General Secretary of the Phony Synod, who, in the process of stage-managing that fraud upon the Church, was exposed for literally stealing copies of the Five Cardinals Book in which Cardinal Burke and four other cardinals defended the Church's traditional teaching on the impossibility of admitting public adulterers in "second marriages" to Holy Communion. It was Baldisseri who ordered the book removed from the mailboxes of Synod fathers at the same time he and the rest of his cabal were manipulating the Synod to undermine the very teaching the Five Cardinals were defending. The...

Austrian Bishop Andreas Laun said in a new interview that he agrees with the concerns of the cardinals who signed the dubia asking the pope for moral clarity on Amoris Laetitia, putting him "in the best company." "I have read the concerns of the Four Cardinals, and I agree with them!" he told Dr. Maike Hickson of OnePeterFive. "Additionally, I know personally especially Cardinals Meisner and Caffarra and know how competent they are! With them, I am in the best company!" The dubia is a formal request Cardinals Raymond Burke, Joachim Meisner, Walter Brandmüller and Carlo Caffarra sent to Pope...

An Austrian bishop has given a sweeping interview claiming that "remarried" Catholics now have the "blessing of the Pope" to receive Communion, the use of contraception is "a decision of conscience" for couples, and homosexuals can constitute a "family." Bishop Benno Elbs, who heads the Feldkirch diocese in west Austria, made the comments in an interview with Die Presse on December 23. Regarding the admission of “remarried” divorced Catholics to Communion, he said, “The teaching [of the Church] has changed insofar as she has opened the door. People have made decisions of conscience in the past, but now they can...

2016 marked a dramatic turning point in the pontificate of Pope Francis. It may be called the year of the great awakening, as more and more faithful Catholics and prelates, Cardinals included, came to a frightening understanding that there is a major problem with the current Pope. For the beginning years of his papacy, most, including LifeSite, gave Francis the benefit of the doubt. They repeatedly told themselves and others not to believe the media; that his words were being taken out of context or mistranslated; that he was just plain poor at doing interviews; that he wasn’t often aware...

Just over a year ago, a reader had a revealing and candid conversation with a Vatican official close to Pope Francis’ inner circle. They were traveling on the same flight to Rome; the official was on his way back from the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia, just before the 2015 Ordinary Synod on the Family. What he said was remarkable for its rejection of orthodoxy and contempt for the core teachings of the Catholic faith. The reader has kindly shared the contents of their exchange, one that offers valuable insights into how this pontificate viewed the Synod on the...

ROME (katolisches.info) – The painful tension of doubt grows stronger with each day that Pope Francis refuses to answer the questions posed by the “Four Cardinals” regarding His Holiness’ statement on marriage, Amoris Laetitia. The doubt itself has metastasized dramatically since the “dubia” letter’s release two months ago. As Church hierarchy continues to publicly declare allegiance with one or the other side, giving strength to the impression of a fractured Church, the unnecessary viciousness of Papal confidants’ rebukes to the Four, strange rumors of a Pope “boiling with rage,” a “police-state Vatican atmosphere,” and Francis apparently declaring he will “go...

There has been a moral and pastoral crisis for the last half century in the Church, but I honestly think we haven’t yet seen anything like what might lie ahead. The 4 Cardinals—I like to call them "The Four Just Men" (coined by the prolfiic Edgar Wallace a century ago)—have nailed the roots of this threat in their five questions related to the apparent undermining of Church doctrine on intrinsically evil acts and the objective formation of conscience in Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia (AL). In fact, we are already seeing the very divisive effects of this document’s confusion. For...

The President of the Bishops' Conferences, Cardinal Marx, sees the Franciscan letter "Amoris laetitia" in an interview with the KNA as "no new teaching". According to Marx, the pope wants to "throw a new, pastoral view of reality". For the Archbishop of Munich, the aim was "to shape and respect the conscience decision of the individual". Marx left open in the discussion whether there would be a joint letter from the German bishops. Just a few days ago, Austrian diocesan bishop Benno Elbs had said in connection with "Amoris laetita" that this was a change in the doctrine.

For the benefit of our readers, Mr. Andrew Guernsey has graciously shared with us his Denzinger-style research identifying the sources of Church teaching and perennial discipline, and exhaustively cataloguing the Bergoglian machinations, to allow communion for divorced and civilly “remarried” adulterers. In a nutshell, this is nearly every known utterance of the topic from the dawn of man, until our current, pathetic state of affairs. The document starts with the Old Testament, then the New Testament, and then continues chronologically through the Fathers, popes, martyrs, councils and more upon which the Church bases its unchanging doctrine of the indissolubility of...

German bishops will soon publish guidelines allowing the divorced and civilly remarried to sacrilegiously receive Holy Communion while continuing to live in sin. Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer, Germany announced on December 17 his intention to publish guidelines instructing priests how to give the sacraments to civilly remarried Catholics. The bishop professed that Pope Francis in his apostolic exhortation "Amoris Laetitia" (AL) has made this possible on a case-by=case basis. [T]he pope says that, without changing Church doctrine, we must distinguish between the different circumstances people live in. We priests are not here to replace a person's conscience. Francis wants...