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[Catholic Caucus] Anatomy of a Vatican II Huckster: Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in the Feb. 2018 Print Edition of Catholic Family News (subscribe HERE). We reprint it here in light of a report that Cardinal Maradiaga had to be evacuated from a plane in his native Honduras earlier this week due to political protests at the airport and even a potential “danger of lynching.” As the following article demonstrates, the Honduran cardinal and close collaborator of Pope Francis is quite a scandalous character.***** Plucked from Obscurity to Attack Catholic Moral Teaching As the coordinator of...

The Second Vatican Council: A Story Now Being Written Dr. Roberto de Mattei Editor’s Note: The following is the full transcript of a speech given by Professor Roberto de Mattei, founder and president of the Lepanto Foundation, in Seville, Spain (Mar. 2, 2019). It first appeared in the print edition of Catholic Family News in two parts (April and May 2019 issues). Professor de Mattei was in Seville to address a conference organized by Adelante la Fe, a Spanish-language Catholic news media apostolate. ***** Exactly sixty years ago, on 25 January 1959, Pope John XXIII announced to the world the...

[Catholic Caucus] Curia Cardinal: Francis Is Loved By The Enemies of His Predecessors There is no opposition against Pope Francis in the Roman Curia, Cardinal Kurt Koch told the Austrian State radio ORF (April 20), "Only a small minority wishes him to be a bit different.” According to Koch, the popes were always criticized, however, with Francis the fractions have shifted, “The former popes were criticized by the progressive wing but now it is the traditionalist [= Catholic] wing that has its problems with Pope Francis.” Koch stressed that Francis "likes it a lot to be pope." The cardinal was...

Vatican City, October 11, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Fourteen small groups of members of the Synod on Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment discussed the Instrumentum Laboris (IL), or working document, guiding the Synod’s deliberations this week.   Divided by language groups, there were four English-language conversations, three French, two Spanish, one German, and one Portuguese. For many of the participants, these were foreign, or second, languages.  The reports of these sessions were largely difficult to read; most were verbose and poorly organized. However, certain themes and tendencies were clear.  First, the English-speaking groups were concerned that the IL...

ROME, October 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, a close collaborator of Pope Francis, was present at the homosexual drug-fuelled party raided by the Vatican police in the summer of 2017 at which his secretary, Monsignor Luigi Capozzi, was arrested. A highly-placed Vatican source with direct knowledge, who must remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, tells LifeSite that the Pope himself knows of Coccopalmerio’s presence at the party. The party took place in an apartment in the building of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). Coccopalmerio was head of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts...

This latest retelling of the grisly story of St. Luke’s NuChurch re-education gulag for recalcitrant priests is reminding me that we need to talk about something.Let’s talk about the abuse of holy obedience, and how Holy Obedience doesn’t count if we’re talking about spiritual suicide; obeying your superiors right over the cliff to perdition.This from Zed has been gaining some traction in the wake of the horror story of Fr. Kalchik (which I think we haven’t heard the last of, and don’t know the half of…)The pattern is alarmingly similar. The priest has some sort of dust up in the...

I offer this article in honor of Pope St. Pius X on his feast day in the calendar of the traditional Roman Rite – that is, September 3.On September 8, 1907, Pope Pius X issued his encyclical letter Pascendi Dominici Gregis, On the Doctrine of the Modernists. The Modernists in question were a group of mostly European Catholic intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who, as they saw it, had the mission of bringing Christianity “up to date” and into conformity with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. To them, the march of modern progress, most...

Among present-day American leftists (who prefer calling themselves progressives), a curious characteristic is their sympathy for Islam. They deplore what they call Islamophobia, regarding it as a sin as bad as racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia; and they are horrified that a man they consider to be an Islamophobe, Donald Trump, should be in the White House. Why is this sympathy for Islamic “curious”? Because no religion could be more at odds with progressive ideas than Islam. For one thing, Islam believes in God, an all-powerful God who controls everything in the created world. Progressives, on the other...

Today the Italian bishops have started their plenary meeting whose main task is to establish a list of three candidates from which Pope Francis will choose their new president. The Italian journalist Marco Tosatti writes that Francis, sometime ago, when he was asked how the new president should be, replied in Italian "avanzato, avanzato, avanzato" (progressive, progressive, progressive). Tosatti comments, "Not a holy man; a progressive man."

Having attained their goal in 2016 of allowing those committing adultery through invalid second "marriages" to receive Holy Communion, "progressive" Catholics have been quick to set out their plans for Pope Francis. Here are their top four goals for 2017. 1. Allowing Protestants to receive Holy Communion. Buoyed by his success in attaining communion in "special circumstances" for divorced and remarried Catholics Cardinal Kasper has expressed the hope that Pope Francis's next declaration will allow Protestants "in special circumstances" to recieve Holy Communion. Cardinal Kasper confided his next goal to the newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference: "I hope that...

Even as Pope Francis wins the applause of the world for giving Catholicism a friendlier face, critics have started to grumble. On social media and in opinion columns, they have drawn up a list of grievances. While they approve of his pastoral outreach, they are concerned that he is leaving the Church unprepared to face the challenges of our age. They admire many of the men he has promoted, but fret that he has also empowered bishops who want to lead the Church on a dangerous, radical course – and may well do so once he departs. No, these critics...

Wherefore he saith: Rise thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead: and Christ shall enlighten thee. – Eph. 5:14 Despite the tremendously destructive threat posed by the Synod on the Family, it has accomplished – even before its completion – something of real value: it has given the entire world a front-row seat in the Modernist operating theater as they attempt to empty a well-established Church teaching of its authentic meaning and replace it with what can only be described as a diabolical lie. Day by day, more faithful Catholics are waking up to the fact that the Church’s...

Conservative cheers resonated throughout much of Catholic social media when it was reported that on day one of the Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Péter Erdő, with Pope Francis seated directly by his side, delivered an address that forcefully reaffirmed traditional Church doctrine and discipline relative to the civilly divorced and remarried and those in homosexual relationships. Spurring on the applause is the fact that the cardinal’s intentions seemed rather obvious; namely, to preemptively discredit the arguments that are expected to be made by those who favor the controversial proposals put forth by Cardinal Walter Kasper. More provocative still is that...

The standards at the National Catholic Reporter (aka Fishwrap) are devolving by the week.This last week they accused Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI of sinning against the Holy Spirit.Ron Schmit – no, you have never heard of this schlemiel so don’t strain your memory – a priest in Byron, California, penned an opinion piece against the use of the Usus Antiquior.It is a silly piece, all in all, and I have been busy doing more important things, such as eating 酸辣湯 at slightly greasy noodle shops in Manhattan.But one thing Schmit wrote was so spectacularly stupid that...

Art as Propaganda for Evolution April 10, 2009 — Should a scientific theory be propagated by appeal to scientific evidence, or by appeal to emotions through visualization?  Nature this week contained two articles that shamelessly praised art as propaganda for evolution.  Surprisingly, one of them mentioned Charles Darwin as someone “at the cutting edge of visualization.” Endless Forms:  Carl Zimmer reviewed an exhibit currently at the Yale Center for British Art, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts.1  The title is taken from the last sentence in the Origin where Darwin said that endless forms most beautiful...

Catholic Tradition: A Mediated Gift By Stephen Hand For Roman Catholics Tradition is a source of revelation. This is a major and substantial difference between Catholics and all Protestants. Unlike most Protestants, who believe that the Faith of Jesus Christ is completely perspicuous and can be apprehended in an unmediated way by recourse of individuals to the holy Scriptures, the Church teaches that even Scripture is part of, and a witness to, the Tradition which preceded it in the economy of salvation. This being so, it is the task of the Church's magisterium alone to interpret this current of revelation....

  Criticizing Pope John Paul II By JOHN YOUNG  That Pope John Paul II should get a barrage of criticism from modernists is only to be expected. But he also comes in for unsparing criticism from so-called traditionalists; and that is what I want to discuss here.   It is not that they recognize his great achievements, but think that an occasional statement or practical decision is wrong. The people I am referring to seem to go through papal statements in search of errors and scrutinize the Pope’s activities for inappropriate or imprudent actions.  Here is a man who has fearlessly and devotedly promoted...