Free Republic

The current trend of combining religion, business, governments around the globe, and the radical Climate “church” should be concerning to anyone who values liberty. The dangers of Agenda 21’s push for worldwide Sustainable Development is well documented. Though the dangers of the radical green agenda have been trumpeted by many, including Glenn Beck, their warnings seem to have fallen on deaf ears even among those who surround the his holiness, the Pope. Catholic World reports that Catholic leaders recently held an international forum on economic growth and environmental sustainability in Rome. During the event Cardinal Wuerl made a disturbingly socialist...

WASHINGTON — A majority of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week rejected a request from the Archdiocese of Washington and Priests for Life to have the full court review their challenge to the Health and Human Services’ contraceptive mandate. According to the archdiocese and Priests for Life, the mandate as it currently applies forces them to be complicit in the provision of contraceptive services, including abortifacient drugs that seriously violate their Catholic beliefs. “We concluded that the regulation challenged in this case does not, as a matter of law or fact, give plaintiffs’ conduct the contraception-facilitating...

GREENVILLE, S.C. — A federal judge in South Carolina has partially upheld the practice of Christian prayers during high school graduation ceremonies. As previously reported, an anonymous couple contacted the American Humanist Association (AHA) in 2013 to complain that Mountain View Elementary School had held its graduation ceremony at the chapel on the campus of North Greenville University, a Christian institution in Traveler’s Rest. They also cited that prayers had been presented at the event. The prayers, according to reports, had been written by the children and were reviewed by school officials before being presented. In response to the complaint,...

Why many Catholic Tibetans have maintained the faith despite decades of persecutionOpening the church door in Baihanluo reveals a large portrait of Pope Francis — something of a paradox in an ethnically Tibetan area of Communist China. The village is only reachable on foot or by horse, and surrounded by snow-capped Himalayan peaks. But despite its remoteness, French missionaries built the church — with a curved, Chinese-style roof — at the end of the 19th century. Pope Gregory XVI assigned Tibet to the Foreign Missions Society of Paris, shortly after China was forced to open its doors following its defeat...

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. (Christian Examiner) – Texas Senator Ted Cruz believes in "God's people of faith," the 2016 presidential contender wrote in a recent letter to pastors across the nation. The letter was an invitation for recipients to participate in Issachar Training today and tomorrow -- May 21-22 -- in Oklahoma City. The unique training, offered in various cities throughout the year, provides information and motivation for at least 1,000 pastors across the nation in 2016 to run for an elective office at the local, state or national level. The event takes its name from I Chronicles 12:32: "Men who...

Members of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart pray in their motherhouse chapel in Fushun, China, in this 2007 photo. The community of nuns was founded in the 1930s by Maryknoll. (CNS file/Nancy Wiechec) By Laura Ieraci Catholic News ServiceVATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis asked Catholics worldwide to show solidarity through their prayers for Catholics in China and for persecuted Christians over the Pentecost weekend.The World Day of Prayer for the Church in China is observed each year on the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians, May 24, which this year falls on Pentecost.Catholics in China invoke Mary,...

BALTIMORE, MD, May 19, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- Breaking a month of silence on the scandal created by one of its high-level executives living in a homosexual “marriage,” the head of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) said the organization has yet to decide whether it should employ someone who violates Church teaching in this manner. The US Bishops’ international relief agency is working on it, CRS President and CEO Carolyn Woo told Aleteia’s John Burger in an interview published May 18. “CRS has a senior person who is in a civil gay marriage,” Woo said, “and the question is, ‘Is that a...

QUO VADIS FRANCIS?FRANCIS, THE LIBERATION POPEAccording to Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Francis has close ties with liberation theology, the same Discaterio that once condemned the movement. In the 1980s the CDF under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, attacked liberation theology as borrowing “from various currents of Marxist thought and praxis“.By embracing and supporting Marxist liberation theology Francis has renegade the Magisterium of the Church that condemned Communism as “the fatal plague which insinuates itself into the very marrow of the human society only to bring about its ruin” Pope Leo XIII...

If you go to the website of any Alinskyian organization with congregational members, it isn’t likely they’ll admit to supporting abortion or same-sex marriage or birth control or a host of other progressive positions that travel together in the political world. In fact, if one were to ask the question directly, he would likely receive an answer similar to Mark Warren’s in his book Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy. He writes that the Alinskyian organizing networks and their local affiliates take “no action on such culturally pisive issues as abortion and teaching about gay life styles...

Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced his presidential bid at Liberty University, a well-known conservative, Christian college founded by Jerry Falwell. It's a testament to his faith and Southern Baptist roots that have kept him grounded throughout his life. But here are five facts you may not know about Cruz's personal faith. 1. While Cruz says that government should protect the religious rights of people, leaders should avoid using their faith for political gain. In a 2013 interview, he explained that faith is "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Life, liberty, and property, the...

Diarmuid Martin stresses ‘people should be informed’ about about same-sex marriage Catholic Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin has declined to comment on the position of those Catholics who may vote Yes in Friday’s same-sex marriage referendum. It was not his policy “to tell others how to vote”, a spokeswoman said, while he stressed “that people should be informed”. Responding to a query from The Irish Times as to the position of Catholics who may in conscience vote Yes on Friday, she said: “Archbishop Martin has publicly stated how he intends to vote and why. “It is not his policy, however,...

She personally performed abortions on women, using a bicycle pump, and later boasted that she and her group had personally murdered exactly 10,141 children in the womb. She supports the legalization of euthanasia, the liberalization of drug use, and the legal prohibition of conscience exemptions for doctors who refuse to perform abortion. She even opposes the burial of aborted children in cemeteries. She is Emma Bonino, the radical leftist Italian politician, a member of the Italian Radical Party currently serving, incredibly enough, as Foreign Minister for the corrupt Italian government. And she was greeted warmly days ago by Pope Francis,...

Many Catholics and others were puzzled by the appearance of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Professor Jeffrey Sachs and former Senator Tim Wirth as speakers or honored guests at a Vatican sponsored conference on global warming. All three have spent years actively undermining Church teaching on questions of abortion and UN-style family planning, which includes active population control.

Several pieces have been posted recently on the unabated persecution of Christians and other religious minorities like Yazidis and Mandeans in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East — and of the relative indifference of the State Department and the Obama administration to it.  Last month, journalist Kirsten Powerswrote in USA Today that President Obama “just can’t seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians.”  Reporting on a joint press conference that Obama held with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, she writes: As Renzi was questioned about the incident, Obama   was mute on the killings. He...

One of the most common assumptions is that religiosity is linked to economic and technological underdevelopment. As a society gets more technologically and economically advanced, the thinking goes, religiosity naturally fades away and is replaced by a more secular worldview. Exhibit A is usually Western Europe, which grew more secular as it grew richer (and much, much more violent) across the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhibit B is the world's most religious continent — Africa — which happens to be its poorest. Under this view, the 21st century will be the century in which secularization spreads even further as the...

Catholics, as a segment of U.S. population, shrank by 3.1% from 2007 to 2014, and are now outnumbered as a portion of American population by the “nones”, the religiously unaffiliated. That was the headline-grabbing revelation last week from the Pew Research Center.  That trend fits within the overall decline in affiliation with Christian denominations, notwithstanding population growth in the U.S. in the same time period. So there it was in black in white:  approximately 51 million adult Catholics in the United States as of 2014 versus approximately 56 million religiously “unaffiliated” adults. That should come as no surprise to any Catholic...

The Chinese government has allowed the ordination of Russian Orthodox priests, for the first time in 60 years, the AsiaNews service reports. Metropolitan Hilarion, who heads the external-affairs department of the Moscow patriarchate, announced the ordinations after his return from a visit to China. His trip came shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to Moscow, meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Orthodox Patriarch Kirill. Metropolitan Hilarion reported “very constructive talks” with government officials in Beijing, adding that China is a society that properly values the “role of culture, traditions and the moral factor in shaping the lives of...

As Friday’s referendum on same-sex marriage in Ireland approaches, attention has turned to the funding behind the Yes campaign. A petition has been launched which says that “this push for same-sex marriage in Ireland has not at all been a ‘home-grown’ phenomenon, but, rather, a carefully-orchestrated and massively well-funded assault on the natural family, coming from private American funding”. In most countries funding local politics with overseas money would be as popular with voters as barbecuing puppydogs at a school fair. But not, apparently, in Ireland. A charity founded by Irish-American businessman Chuck Feeney, Atlantic Philanthropies, cheerfully acknowledges that it...

Moscow, May 19, Interfax - Members of all State Duma factions have supported a bill allowing only state-run healthcare institutions to perform abortions and cancelling mandatory health insurance coverage for abortions. The press service of head of the State Duma committee for family, women and children Yelena Mizulina, a co-author of this bill, said that, according to the proposed document, performing abortions outside of state-run healthcare institutions should carry a fine of 50,000 rubles to 200,000 rubles for citizens, a fine of 500,000 rubles to 800,000 rubles for officials, and a fine of 500,000 rubles to 800,000 rubles for entrepreneurs...

The Tri-Faith Initiative in Omaha has lofty goals for the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim partners involved. It is best summed up in the Tri-Faith’s Vision Statement: In working together, our vision is to build bridges of respect, trust and acceptance, to challenge stereotypes of each other, to learn from one another, and to counter the influence of extremists and agents of hate.