Free Republic

One of the more enigmatic figures from early Christian history is Saint Veronica—the woman known to Catholics from the Sixth Station of the Cross, who is said to have wiped the face of Jesus while He carried His cross on the road to Calvary. There is a memorable and beautifully presented sequence of scenes featuring Veronica in Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. But nowhere is the woman or the incident described mentioned in Sacred Scripture. To learn about Veronica, we must turn to extra-biblical sources. The first mention of a woman named Veronica associated with Our Lord may be...

It is time for Christians individually and corporately to repent for the way we and our institutions responded to the COVID-19 outbreak.Blaming people for contracting a catchy virus has been one of many widely deployed COVID manipulation tactics. That has shifted into blaming people for dying of a catchy virus after they decided their risks from taking the vaccines outweighed their risks from catching the disease.Shaming people for dying by accident is a bit twisted, but it might make sense if you believe life is over once a person stops breathing, and so cling to the illusion of human control...

Pastor Mark Biltz, the man who discovered that such events historically have been accompanied by significant developments for the nation of Israel, is keeping an eye on the next lunar eclipse, Jan. 30. It’s called a “super blood wolf moon eclipse” because it will be a total lunar eclipse for parts of North America at a time when the full moon is at the closet point of its orbit to the Earth. It’s also the first of its type in 2019. It will occur at about 12:12 a.m. until 12:44 a.m. “The Super Blood Moon this year is also known...

ROME — Pope Francis has changed Catholic Church teaching to fully reject the death penalty, the Vatican announced Thursday, saying it would work to abolish capital punishment worldwide. The change addresses several sentences of the catechism, the compendium of Catholic teaching, but it sharply amplifies the church’s opposition against one of the world’s most debated policies. The church’s updated teaching states that capital punishment is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Previously, the church allowed for the death penalty in very rare cases, only as a means of “defending human lives against...

A survivor of clerical sexual abuse has said Pope Francis told him that God had made him gay and loved him, in arguably the most strikingly accepting comments about homosexuality to be uttered by the leader of the Roman Catholic church. Juan Carlos Cruz, who spoke privately with the pope two weeks ago about the abuse he suffered at the hands of one of Chile’s most notorious paedophiles, said the issue of his sexuality had arisen because some of the Latin American country’s bishops had sought to depict him as a pervert as they accused him of lying about the...

University of Idaho President Tim White has entered the debate pitting Charles Darwin's theories of life against religious-based alternatives by forbidding anything other than evolution from being taught in the Moscow school's life, earth and physical science classes. "This (evolution) is the only curriculum that is appropriate to be taught in our biophysical sciences," he wrote. "Teaching of views that differ from evolution may occur in faculty-approved curricula in religion, sociology, philosophy, political science or similar courses. However, teaching of such views is inappropriate in our life, earth, and physical science courses."