Free Republic

What in the world is going on in Rome this week? First the Vatican press office issues a statement from the Council of Cardinals, supporting the Pope. It would certainly be news if the Council of Cardinals did not support the Pope. But why was this statement newsworthy? Why did the Council thank the Pontiff in February for a speech he delivered to the Roman Curia in December? Is there any way to see this message as something other than damage control—as a bid to reassure the world that the increasingly evident tensions within the Catholic hierarchy are not tearing...

You can imagine my shock as a Catholic when I read a passage from the father of the modern, pro-abortion population control movement where he denounces faithful Catholics as “terrorist[s].”  Here is what pro-abort population controller Dr. Paul Ehrlich in his 2014 book Hope on Earth: A Conversation:  “Thus you have ‘God-fearing’ people trying to maintain their rigid positions, especially trying to control the lives of women. I consider that their rigid opposition to something so basic, so critical to the future of life on Earth, as controlling reproduction to be just as unethical as any major affront to the...

In face of the confusion caused by the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and after having shown in two recent studies the lamentable incoherencies and falsities in the document (see here and here), and Denzinger-Bergoglio would like to remind its readers of the teachings that the Church has always conveyed to the ‘remarried divorced’ and to sinners in general.

Against the evidence there is little to argue. The outstretched hand of Pope Bergoglio to the Society of St. Pius X is the same, which has recently dealt blows to the Order of Malta and the Franciscans of the Immaculate. The story of the Order of Malta ended with the unconditional surrender of the Grand Master and the return of power to Albrecht von Boeselager along with the powerful German group he represents. The story was summarized in these terms by Riccardo Cascioli of La Nuova Bussola quotidiana: “the one responsible for the moral drift of the Order has been...

The Maltese bishops' guidelines on Communion mean that secular culture has triumphed over the Church It has been a long time since I last wrote on this site. I am only breaking my silence now because I am so distressed to find the unmistakeable signs that the Church is in the midst of a crisis. The crisis is proceeding almost absent-mindedly under its own momentum, but its nature is clear: the secularist ideologisation of the moral sense. Even more distressing, it is Malta of all places in the world where its signs are most unignorable – and given my personal...

On Wednesday, January 25, 2017, Veri Catholici, the International Association of Catholics for the Defense of the Faith against the Errors of Cardinal Kasper, published in the Times of Malta Newspaper, on p. 29, an Open Letter to the Bishops of Malta and Gozo regarding their recent pastoral document, in which they have openly approved of communion for those living in public sin. The actual text of the Open Letter is as follows, in jpg format, for proof the advertisement was published in the Times of Malta, and if you visit the Veri Catholic website you can add your name...

The L’Osservatore Romano is raving about the letter of the German bishops introducing communion for adulterers, a decision that reduces the indissolubility of matrimony to a meaningless principle while in the individual case adultery is allowed. The German bishops are known for their heterodoxy that has led their local church in an unprecedented crisis with over 100,000 Catholics leaving their Church every year and the number of priestly ordinations down to 58 in 2015. https://gloria.tv/video/4phXZ3ju4Ssg4w2KnZCFEV6Yy

In the very second that the clock struck midnight and the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church’s new liturgy allowing gay couples to marry in church weddings came into force, Kjell Frølich Benjaminsen and Erik Skjelnæs tied the knot in Eidskog Church. A church synod voted on Monday to approve the new liturgy, or service, allowing same-sex couples to get married in the church. At the stroke of midnight, Benjaminsen and Skjelnæs stood before the altar and made their vows in front of pastor Bettina Eckbo, who led the historic ceremony. “It was great fun and really cozy to be a part...

Criticism of the alarming and quite unprecedented direction of the current pontificate is now firmly established in the mainstream Catholic commentariat. This is most encouraging as the post-Vatican II crisis in the Church, now approaching the Arian crisis (which lasted some sixty years) in duration, enters a new and critical phase. Father Gerald E. Murray is one of the leaders in this auspicious development. His training and doctorate in canon law give him a perspective that permits a precise diagnosis of the raging controversy over Amoris Laetitia (AL), which continues to expand as it convulses the human element of the...

Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the Vatican's doctrinal czar, said Wednesday that Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics is against Church doctrine and no one, including the pope, can change that. On the same day, the German bishops wrote that Pope Francis' 'Amoris Laetitia' does in fact, open doors to access the sacraments, at least in some circumstances. ROME - Over the past ten months, bishops around the world have issued widely varying interpretations of Pope Francis’s document Amoris Laetitia, especially its provisions on Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. Rarely has the contrast been quite as sharp as Wednesday, however,...

To him too, in addition to Pope Francis, cardinals Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra, and Meisner had sent their five “dubia” on the interpretation of “Amoris Laetitia,” seeking “clarity.” And neither he, Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller, prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, nor much less the pope had responded until now to the questions of the four cardinals. To make up for this, however, now Müller is bringing clarity, and how, in an extensive interview that is coming out today in the magazine “Il Timone,” conducted by editor Riccardo Cascioli and by Lorenzo Bertocchi: > La verità non...

LifeSiteNews has just brought the attention of the Anglophone Catholic world to what was first reported by the French journal Le Figaro: “as many as thirty cardinals expressed their reservations to Pope Francis about his Exhortation Amoris Laetitia [AL] prior to its April 2016 release” and that “writing to Francis either individually or in small groups, [they] attempted last year to dissuade the pope from releasing Amoris. They warned that it would not only weaken the Church’s teaching on marriage, but on the Eucharist and confession as well…” In other words, some thirty cardinals warned the Pope that, should it...

A faithful reader has asked the Bear's opinion on a piece by a popular, if angry-sounding, ephemerist, regarding Pope Francis. While the Bear has never considered consulting a human's opinion (finding woodland creatures to be far more sensible) he granted the reader's request in his benevolence. The Answer in 32 Points The piece explains why Pope Francis is not the Pope, and why Pope Benedict still is, and, moreover, the worst Pope in history. In summary, we have to wait for the real Pope (Benedict) to die, then elect his successor, which would completely bypass Francis. It consists of 32...

Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo, a Maltese island, has allegedly threatened priests that he will suspend them a divinis if they refuse Holy Communion to the divorced and civilly "remarried". The German website Katholisches reports that Bishop Mario Grech announced his decision to impose this canonical punishment immediately on returning from Rome. Bishop Mario Grech is the co-signatory with Archbishop Charles Scicluna of the document, "Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia". Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Bishop Mario Grech have instructed priests to allow the divorced and civilly "remarried", who are sexually active despite the existence of...

3 prelates appeal to prayer: "That Pope Francis may confirm the unchanging praxis of the Church with regard to the truth of the indissolubility of marriage" Note: We were asked to promote the following text and prayer with you, our readers, and ask you and other media to please share it far and wide. It was written by Tomash Peta, Metropolitan Archbishop of the archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana; Jan Pawel Lenga, Archbishop-Bishop emeritus of Karaganda; and Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana: Following the publication of the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, in...

Each week I resolve to devote this column to something other than the Bergoglian pontificate, but each week a new development makes that impossible. For Pope Francis is in the process of making history – and not in a good way. Witness the recent publication of “guidelines” for “the application of Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia” — note well: Chapter 8 — by the bishops of once Catholic Malta. Based entirely on Amoris Laetitia (AL), the Maltese bishops now declare that the floodgates are open to Holy Communion for literally any divorced and “remarried” person who persuades himself that he...

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently published a widely circulated commentary on the recent fall-out from Amoris Laetitia entitled, “The End of Catholic Marriage”. In it, he argued persuasively that if Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marital love comes to be generally interpreted and applied as liberally as it has been in the Diocese of San Diego, California, it will in effect mean the death of this sacrament as the Gospel of Christ and the Catholic Church have always presented it: a sacred covenant whose indissoluble character means that remarriage after divorce constitutes adultery – a violation of the...

When highly placed Italian prelates declare that “only a blind man cannot see” that confusion is the ecclesiastical order of the day, and that such confusion has as its fundamental source Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, matters have reached crisis level. Catholics who have not followed the intense three-year debate over (among other things) admitting to holy Communion divorced-and-remarried Catholics who are living as married persons should stop reading this post and go get caught up on current events. But for those sufficiently aware of the doctrinal and disciplinary issues at stake I offer some observations in the wake of this...

If, as a result of the process of discernment, undertaken with “humility, discretion and love for the Church and her teaching, in a sincere search for God’s will and a desire to make a more perfect response to it” (AL 300), a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (see AL, notes 336 and 351). I wonder what would happen...

If, as a result of the process of discernment, undertaken with "humility, discretion and love for the Church and her teaching, in a sincere search for God’s will and a desire to make a more perfect response to it" (AL 300), a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (see AL, notes 336 and 351).» In brief: yes to communion...