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New Ways Ministry, a far-left, dissident LGBT group, has leaked to the press two letters written to them by Pope Francis. In the letters, Francis thanks the organization for their 'neighborly work' and praises its dissident founder, Sr. Jeannine Gramick, as a "valiant woman." New Ways Ministry was officially barred from calling itself a Catholic ministry and from working with homosexuals in 1999 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was serving as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. ...

New book suggests St. Gallen Mafia agreement may have led to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignationAuthor Julia Meloni tells us that Martini's own confessor claimed that Benedict's resignation had been “scripted since his pontificate's beginning – because Martini had shifted his votes to Ratzinger at the 2005 Conclave."(LifeSiteNews) — The American scholar and columnist Julia Meloni has just published her long-awaited, excellent, and deeply researched history of the Sankt Gallen Mafia, a group of progressive bishops regularly meeting in Switzerland and plotting to further revolutionize the Catholic Church. The Sankt Gallen Mafia: Exposing the Secret Reformist Group Within the Church tells...

Hans Küng, a controversial Swiss Catholic theologian, professor and priest, who was once censured by the late Pope John Paul II, has died at age 93. Küng, who was known to be critical of Catholic theology, passed away at his home in Tübingen, Germany, on Tuesday, according to a report by Vatican News. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, himself the subject of critique by Küng, released a statement quoted by Vatican News commending the late theologian for trying “to revive the dialogue between faith and the natural sciences and to assert, with regard to scientific thought, the reasonableness and necessity of...

LIMA — It was more than just an answer to prayer. A US military mission that cornered and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan was nothing short of a miracle, said Peru's President Alan Garcia, who attributed the divine intervention to newly beatified pontiff John Paul II. "His first miracle has been to rid the world of this incarnation of evil, this demon of hatred and criminality," the Peruvian leader said, referring to the Al-Qaeda leader. The late John Paul II showed uncanny timing, with his miracle falling on the very same day as a Rome ceremony beatifying him. Pope...

Washington DC Archbishop Wilton Gregory released a statement last Tuesday lashing out at President Donald Trump for visiting the John Paul II National Shrine. The DC Archbishop Gregory lectured President Trump on “defending the rights of all people even those with whom we might disagree” while at the same time attacking him for visiting a Catholic Shrine.President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump visited the Catholic Shrine before signing an executive order promoting religious freedom.First Lady Melania Trump is a practicing Catholic.The media failed to report this important detail in their hit pieces on President Trump. Instead, Archbishop Gregory made...

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump knelt in prayer behind the scenes during their visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, DC, on Tuesday. A behind-the-scenes photo posted on Melania Trump’s Instagram showed the Trumps kneeling in prayer inside the shrine.

The Twilight of the John Paul II Institute? An interview with Prof. Stanisław Grygiel Hanna Nowak (Teologia Polityczna): In recent days there have been great changes in the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, which you created together with Karol Wojtyła 40 years ago. How do you pull yourself together in the face of your dismissal? Was it possible to predict such a situation? Prof. Stanisław Grygiel (philosopher, ethicist, anthropologist): There have been no changes in the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. The Institute was simply dissolved by Pope Francis exactly...

President Donald Trump commemorated the 40th Anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s first trip to Poland, calling him Sunday “a champion for human dignity and religious liberty.”In a Presidential Message released on June 2 “in Commemoration of the 40th Anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s First Pilgrimage to Poland,” Mr. Trump said that St. Pope John Paul II’s nine-day visit to Poland in 1979 “changed the course of history.” "As we remember the long struggle of the Polish people against communism, we also acknowledge that millions of people now live in freedom because of St. Pope John Paul II and...

In an address given during that 1976 Eucharistic Congress in Philadelphia for the bicentennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla spoke some words which I believe were prophetic: ''We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. I do not think that the wide circle of the American Society, or the whole wide circle of the Christian Community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-church, between the gospel and the anti-gospel, between Christ and the Antichrist. The confrontation...

While some frenzied protestors call Trump “illiterate,” Polish crowds were impressed at the American president’s depth of historical understanding in (last year's) speech delivered in Warsaw’s Krasinski Square. The place chosen for the speech was remarkable in itself and holds great significance for Poles. Trump chose to speak at the memorial to the Warsaw Uprising in the center of Warsaw which commemorates the battle to the death by the Polish underground, bedraggled, outnumbered, and deciding on one last stand against their Nazi oppressors in August 1944. They had little chance of winning and hoped that the Soviet promise to help...

An Instrumentum laboris (working paper) was prepared for the XIV Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops and published on June 23, 2015. It covers a range of topics germane to the Synod’s theme of the family. Paragraph 137 addresses a key document of the modern Magisterium, Humanae Vitae, in a way that both calls the force of that teaching into question and proposes a method of moral discernment that is decidedly not Catholic. This approach to discernment contradicts what has hitherto been taught by the Magisterium of the Church about moral norms, conscience, and moral judgment, by suggesting that...

Monsignor Longhi’s confidence, which ended up on YouTube, stirs discussion. The prelate tells Vatican Insider about John Paul II’s words to the US President, “At the feet of this idol you call security, you want to sacrifice all human dignity”Saint John Paul II was a mystic, “he dialogued” with Our Lady and had prophetic visions. One of these visions has to do with the future of Europe and a potential “Islamist invasion”. But there is also talk of a war that “will not be between religions”. And of a strong sentence pronounced by the Pope to American President George Bush...

France’s highest court has demanded that a cross overhanging a statue of former Pope John Paul II be removed from a a square in a Breton town, provoking anger among those who believe France’s Catholic heritage is being destroyed. The Conseil d’État (State Council) says that the presence of the cross goes against the 1905 French law which officially separates church and state. The town of Ploërmel in the northwestern region of Brittany now has six months to remove the cross. However the statue of the former pope can remain because, according to the council, the effigy of the pontiff...

The subject head of the document, carried under the words, “Special Importance,” read: “Regarding Senator Kennedy’s request to the General Secretary of the Communist Party Y. V. Andropov.” According to the memo, Senator Kennedy was “very troubled” by U.S.-Soviet relations, which Kennedy attributed not to the murderous tyrant running the USSR but to President Reagan. The problem was Reagan’s “belligerence,” said the memo, and made worse by Reagan’s stubbornness. “According to Kennedy,” reported Chebrikov, “the current threat is due to the President’s refusal to engage any modification to his politics.” That refusal, said the memo, was exacerbated by Reagan’s political...

A new book reveals he intercepted secret messages from Russia to pass onto GCHQHe was the coach that led the British and Irish Lions to their only test series victory against the All Blacks – and he was also a spy. Under Carwyn James ’ coaching the Lions secured a historic 3-1 victory in 1971, leaving him with the legacy of being perhaps the greatest coach the game has ever known. But in his new book, Into the Wind: The Life of Carwyn James, writer Alun Gibbard reveals a multilingual literature-lover who spied on the Russians during the Cold War....

Pope Francis has marked the “day for life” in Italy by adopting the abortion lobby’s euphemism “interruption of pregnancy” in place of language that accurately describes the killing of unborn children. In his message the Holy Father does speak some welcome words, encouraging “courageous educational action in favour of human life” and reminding the gathered crowds that “every life is sacred”. Unfortunately rather than refer to abortion he adopts terminology used by the abortion industry. In fact, the form of words used by Pope Francis is specifically condemned by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae:“Especially in...

Robert Spaemann said Communion was a 'yes or no' question and that the Pope's document could lead to a schismRobert Spaemann, one of the foremost living Catholic philosophers, has said Amoris Laetitia contradicts the traditional teaching of the Church. In an interview with the German Catholic News Agency, Spaemann says that most of Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation is in line with the Church’s teaching – although some sections are capable of being read otherwise. However, Spaemann says that paragraph 305, when read with its accompanying footnote 351, “directly contradicts [widerspricht direkt] paragraph 84 of John Paul II’s letter Familiaris Consortio.”...

Anyone looking to understand the decades-long struggle between Catholic progressives and the late Pope John Paul II – who was aided in his conservative renewal by his theological wingman, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI – could do no better than reviewing the tale of French Bishop Jacques Gaillot. Gaillot was named bishop of the Diocese of Evreux, west of Paris, in 1982, in the early years of John Paul’s pontificate, and Gaillot quickly came to stand as a symbol of the sort of social activist bishop – and theological liberal – that the Polish pope sought to...

(Aug 2, 2012) POLISH officials have unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, honouring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago. The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organising or taking part in strikes against the communist regime. The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the...

It used to be that just saying the words “liberation theology” around Catholics was enough to start a schism-level fight, or at least raise a red flag in Rome. The theological movement that focused on the poor emerged out of the church’s social justice ferment in the 1960s, but it was always viewed by conservatives as an irredeemably Marxist version of the gospel. Worse, they said it was a tool of Soviet communists who were using the Roman Catholic Church to foment revolution in Latin America and beyond, and at the very height of the Cold War. The 1978 election...