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"Socci: With Papally-Mandated "Catholic Divorce" destroying a Sacrament, Schism Looms Large on the Catholic Horizon" "Newsweek" recently had a photo of Pope Francis on their front-cover with the headline: “Is the Pope Catholic?”. Subtitle: “Of course he is. You just wouldn’t know it from his press clips.” Indeed, it is a legitimate question, seeing that the Argentine Pope has prayed in a Mosque and said in an interview to Scalfari: “There is no Catholic God.” The anxiety in the Church is now becoming enormous after the 8th of September. In fact with two Motu Proprios on the nullity of marriage,...

Quo usque tandem.... I know, I know… I am borrowing heavily from Cicero here. But it seems to me that the Vatican Catilina is not going to enjoy the rest of his disgraceful pontificate, which we hope will be short anyway. The rather explosive news is now everywhere: a seven-page document gravely accusing Francis of incompetence and tampering with doctrine is being circulated within the Vatican, and has been very fittingly leaked to the press. We do not have the translation, but there can be no doubt that the content is brutal. From what I can see the grievances concern...

The finalized, complete list of participants in the Synod of Bishops in 2015 was published in today's Vatican Bollettino: XIV General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (October 4 to 25 2015) - List of Participants, 15/09/2015. In addition to the Synod officers (who are all hold-overs from last year's "Extraordinary Synod"), delegates elected by the Bishops' Conferences and the Union of Superior Generals and confirmed by the Pope as Synod members months ago, and ex officio participants (the heads of the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Prefects or Presidents of Curial dicasteries), the final list contains the names of...

Anyone who wants to understand what we are likely facing next needs to read this book as soon as possible. I hope I am not too late to recommend Edward Pentin’s detailed and balanced book, “The Rigging of a Vatican Synod: An Investigation of Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family,” because anyone who wants to understand what we are likely facing next needs to read it as soon as possible. I am writing this on the 14th of September. This leaves us just under three weeks before the opening of the second half of the Synod on...

Cardinal Schönborn: At Synod, Church should embrace ‘positive elements’ of gay unions and other sexual sins The Church should not look in the bedroom first, but in the dining room!” explained Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in a lengthy interview last week with the Italian Jesuit journal, La Civiltà Cattolica, using a mantra sure to be repeated at the upcoming October Synod on the Family. In the interview, Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, identifies himself as the intellectual architect of so-called “lifestyle ecumenism,” described in the controversial interim report at last year’s Synod on the Family with the approval of Pope Francis,...

"Three Prelates on the evil plans for the Synod speaking in blunt terms on adultery and homosexuality!" Barona at Toronto Catholic Witness has published this post and this incredible video by Polonia Cristiana. CATHOLICS - WAKE UP! It is your duty and it is mine. You can be silent no longer. Our Mother is being raped! Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Return unto the LORD, thy God! "If we do not defend marriage, then we will not defend the Church Herself" Raymond Cardinal Burke Polonia Christiana has released an extraordinary video that focuses our attention on the very grave crisis in the Catholic...

T o much fanfare in the press, Pope Francis has started a "dialogue" about the Catholic Church's marriage practices. The part that has received the most attention is whether civilly divorced and civilly remarried Catholics should be admitted to Holy Communion, without having to abandon their second marriage, which the church recognizes as continuing adultery. This issue will be addressed by the bishops of the Catholic Church at a "Synod on the Family" over this year and next. Unfortunately, the pope's favorite theologian and the pope himself have initiated this discussion in a befogging cloud of pessimism. The pope is...

The preparations for the pope's imminent visit are developing into quite a "dog-and-pony" show, with all the tee shirts, caps, cardboard cut-outs, etc. Lots of excitement is afoot - so much so that many are becoming oblivious to the storm that is about to erupt at the Ordinary Synod of the Family this coming October. Some of us are raising the alarm. Ladies and gentlemen, there is real possibility - if not probability - for schism to result from this synod. This tocsin is also being sounded by Cardinals. Cardinal Reinhard Marx is on record of favoring the distribution of...

Mark Silk is a guy who evidently fancies himself as knowing something about Catholicism. And journalism. But neither of these things is in particular evidence in his most recent piece for Religion News Service.

n 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...

A new book, The Rigging of a Vatican Synod?: An Investigation into Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, will shed much light on allegations that the Extraordinary Synod, held in Rome last October, was subject to manipulation. The book has been written by highly respected Vatican journalist Edward Pentin and carries the endorsement of Wilfrid Fox Cardinal Napier, Archbishop of Durban. Cardinal Napier is one of the fifteen members of the permanent council of cardinals and bishops overseeing the Synod of Bishops, he attended the Extraordinary Synod and was a member of the committee that drafted the...

The Shadow Synod of Switzerland and Germany Has a Follow-up. In Two Books They say that the divorced and remarried and homosexual couples are not waiting for “mercy,” but for recognition of the goodness of their condition. A critical reply from the vicar of the diocese of Chur by Sandro Magister ROME, September 4, 2015 - The previous article from www.chiesa demonstrated the growing resistance, on the part of numerous cardinals and bishops, to the radical changes in the Catholic doctrine and pastoral care of marriage brought into discussion with the synod on the family: > First Five, Now Seventeen...

The Prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, has criticized in Regensburg on Tuesday a "climate of the German claim to leadership for the whole universal Church". At a book presentation, he pointed out the high number of people leaving the church, the deserted confessionals and empty seminars and religious houses in Germany. Often he has been asked from where the establishment of the so-called "German Church" derives the claim to be pacemaker for the universal Church with all the symptoms of a dramatic decline precisely on questions of sexual morality and the Catholic teaching on marriage.

[Translator's Note: Kath.ch, the official website of the Swiss Bishops' Conference, recently published on 21 August 2015 (http://www.kath.ch/newsd/zitat-sich-der-kirche-zuliebe-ueber-die-kirche-hinwegsetzen/) a short comment and summary of an objectively scandalous interview with Dr. Markus Arnold, a Swiss Catholic lay theologian and a professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Lucerne (https://www.unilu.ch/fakultaeten/tf/institute/religionspaedagogisches-institut-rpi/mitarbeitende/markus-arnold/) After this comment, the Swiss Bishops' Conference's website permissively gives the link to the entire original interview.] Excerpts below: Question: The Catechism [of the Catholic Church] says one should treat homosexuals with compassion. Dr. Arnold: The Roman moral teaching on sexuality was created in the 19th century because of an ideologized...

While the Swiss Bishop Vitus Huonder of the Diocese of Chur is still under public criticism for upholding the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on homosexuality, the Swiss Bishops' Conference is coming under pressure because of its alliance with a man who has been himself promoting the homosexual and gender agenda for many years. Dr. Arnd Bünker is the head of the Swiss Institute for Pastoral Sociology, which wrote the Swiss Bishops' Conference much-criticized report in preparation for the upcoming 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family in Rome. The report explicitly and insistently requests that the Church cease...

Here is the passage which I find enormously difficult. "A synod without freedom is not a synod. It is a conference. The synod, instead, is a protected space in which the Holy Spirit can work. And for this reason the persons must be free. This is why I will not allow the things that each one says to be published with name and surname. No, it should not be known who has said it. I have no problem with revealing what has been said, but not who has said it, in such a way that one may feel free to...

“Francis’s vision is that of a Church for all, because Christ really did die for all men, without exception, not just for some.” The “law of gradualness” does not mean “gradualness of the law” or relativism. It is possible to consider exceptions on a case-by-case basis, admitting remarried divorcees to the sacraments, without changes to the doctrine. This is according to Dominical theologian Jean-Miguel Garrigues, Professor of Patristics and Dogmatics at the Institut Supérieur Thomas d’Aquin, at the Dominican House of Studies in Toulouse and at the Seminaire International St Cure'd Ars. He and his confrère, Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn, the...

The grave effects of Ireland’s May 22 referendum in favor of a same-sex “marriages,” not only for the secular world, but also especially for the Catholic Church, are showing themselves already. None other than the leading cardinal who has promoted the liberal agenda for the two-part Synod of Bishops on the Family, Cardinal Walter Kasper, has now come out publicly and with force, telling the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that the Church needs to address more fully the question of same-sex couples. This topic was at the last Synod “only a marginal topic, but now it becomes central,” Kasper...

A one-day study meeting — open only to a select group of individuals — took place at the Pontifical Gregorian University on Monday with the aim of urging “pastoral innovations” at the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family in October. Around 50 participants, including bishops, theologians and media representatives, took part in the gathering, at the invitation of the presidents of the bishops’ conferences of Germany, Switzerland and France — Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Bishop Markus Büchel and Archbishop Georges Pontier. One of the key topics discussed at the closed-door meeting was how the Church could better welcome those in...

The Silos School of Thought, Spain, will dedicate its next two international meetings to the study and dissemination of the thought and action of Pope Francis. It is the ninth encounter of the School which, in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in Spain, and under the auspices of the Benedictine Abbey of Silos, gathered together figures from the worlds of science and culture in an atmosphere of respectful pluralism and convergence in relation to universal values. In a letter to the Steering Committee of the School, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, writes: “In the two...