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A federal court on Friday again said the Trump administration cannot implement its ban on most transgender military service while a lawsuit against it proceeds. “The status quo shall remain ‘steady as she goes,’ and the preliminary injunction shall remain in full force and effect nationwide,” Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington wrote Friday. In doing so, Pechman quoted the top Navy admiral, who told a Senate panel in April that it’s been “steady as she goes” since transgender people have been allowed to serve openly. Pechman is one of four federal...

The Fairfax County School Board voted unanimously on Thursday to approve updated language in its sex education curriculum that is more inclusive to LGBTQ and transgender people. The board brought in a special panel that recommended changing the term “biological sex” to “sex assigned at birth,” which the panel said aligns with recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association and the American College of Physicians. The board also changed sex education policies to provide more information to female students regarding contraception, as well as education on pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for male students. However, the new...

Cardinals pushing radical new vision for the ChurchDUBLIN (ChurchMilitant.com) - The lineup at this fall's World Meeting of Families (WMOF) features some of the world's most revolutionary bishops pushing a leftist path for the Church. Scheduled for August in Dublin, Ireland, the meeting — which will include a visit by Pope Francis — will feature the following prelates, among others: Cdl. Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, Illinois Cdl. Joseph Tobin, Archbishop of Newark, New Jersey Cdl. Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, England Cdl. Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, Austria Cdl. Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Cdl. Oswald Gracias, Archbishop...

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida - After a robust 90-minute discussion during the second day of their bi-annual meeting, the U.S. bishops voted to advance a proposal to produce new materials to complement their official voting guidelines to better apply the teachings of Pope Francis to current issues in the United States. The discussion and vote, however, revealed tensions within the body over both the current content and the medium in which the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is seeking to influence public life, while ultimately resulting in a compromise outcome that will surely be subject to close scrutiny in...

A crisis pregnancy agency funded by the Catholic Church has announced plans to shutdown. The announcement comes a month after the Union of Students in Ireland disassociated itself from Cura due to their failure to ‘provide ‘full support’ for pregnant people when it comes to abortion and abortion support’. In a statement, the agency announced that it will wind down its services by Friday, June 15 due to this ‘new and changed environment’. ‘In this new and changed environment we have been experiencing decreasing service demands in line with national trends and we feel this decision, which has been considered...

TWICKENHAM, England, June 12, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) -- There is a large house on the southwestern outskirts of London. It is an impressive building set back from the road and towering over those who stand in front of it or those who enter. Today, it is an abortion center run by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. This house, in a residential quarter of suburban London, is yet another monument to Britain’s culture of death. It was not always so. At one time, this building was a convent run by a Catholic order of nuns, the Daughters of the Immaculate. In the...

Just weeks after a lopsided, groundbreaking vote struck down Ireland’s constitutional ban on legal abortion, the country’s Taoiseach signaled the broader moral and legal implications of this sea change in a once deeply Catholic nation. “It will not … be possible for publicly funded hospitals, no matter who their patron or owner is,” Leo Varadkar told the Dáil, “to opt out of providing these necessary services which will be legal in this state once this legislation is passed by the Dáil [the lower house of the Irish legislature] and Seanad [senate].” Britain’s Catholic Herald reported today that two large hospitals...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis denounced abortion on Saturday as the "white glove" equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families to accept the children that God gives them.

The Irish referendum—in which 66% of voters chose to allow parliament to legalize abortion—underscored the decadeslong decline of the Catholic church as a political force in that nation. It also accentuated a mirror image in Poland, the last major nation in Europe whose Catholic Church still dominates politics, society, and culture. Poland was once among the easiest places in Europe to get access to an abortion. Under Communism, ferries brought pregnant women from Sweden and Denmark for the procedure, which was free of charge. That changed at the end of the Cold War, when the Catholic church emerged as a...

Pope Francis told leading oil executives Saturday that the transition to less-polluting energy sources “is a challenge of epochal proportions” and warned that satisfying the world’s energy needs “must not destroy civilization.” The Vatican said Francis held a two-day conference with the executives as a follow-up to his encyclical three years ago that called on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills. Participants included the CEOs of Italian oil giant ENI, British Petroleum, ExxonMobil and Norway’s Statoil as well as scientists and managers of major investment funds. Their remarks on the first day of the...

Pope Francis has urged Chinese Catholics on Wednesday to show they are in full communion with the Holy See. The appeal is coming amid what appears to be another stall in the Vatican’s longstanding attempts to reach a deal with Beijing over bishop nominations. Francis made the comments during his general audience, noting that many Chinese Catholics will be marking a feast day dedicated to the Virgin Mary this week in Sheshan, near Shanghai. Francis prayed that all Chinese faithful “can live their faith with generosity and serenity, and can make gestures of fraternity, harmony and reconciliation in full communion”...

Pope Francis will meet with some of the world’s oil executives next week, likely to give them another moral nudge to clean up their act on global warming. Climate change policy and science experts are cautiously hopeful but aren’t expecting any miracles or even noticeable changes. The conference will be a follow-up to the pope’s encyclical three years ago calling on people to save the planet from climate change and other environmental ills, Vatican spokesman Greg Burke confirmed Friday. Cardinal Peter Turkson, who spearheaded the encyclical, set up the June 8-9 conference with the executives. The pope himself will speak...

CALLING TO PRIESTHOOD Bishop Barry Knestout grew up in a Catholic home, as one of nine children (3 girls, 6 boys), to the late Deacon Thomas and Caroline Knestout. His father worked for a national security agency. Barry recalls that growing up, his family always prayed. “Family prayer was in the context of meals — prayer around the table at every meal, and outside of that it was all connected with the Church’s prayer and my father’s personal prayer life.” Bishop Knestout also shares, “I have a devotion to the Holy Spirit that goes back to my father’s participation in...

New York City, N.Y., May 22, 2018 / 08:30 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Archbishop of New York said Tuesday that while some recent comments about homosexuality attributed to Pope Francis are “orthodox teaching,” the pope's reported remarks could require clarification. Cardinal Timothy Dolan affirmed the pope’s recent affirmation of God’s love for a gay man with whom the pontiff visited in Rome, saying: “Jesus would have said that, and so would I. That’s conservative, traditional, Catholic, orthodox teaching. The ‘Catechism’ insists on that.” “While any sexual expression outside of a man and woman in marriage is contrary to God's purpose,...

ROME, May 21, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis’ alleged infelicitous counsel to a gay man, if not retracted, risks slowly killing the same-sex attracted by affirming them to death.   According to multiple reports, a gay man who visited Pope Francis at the Vatican last week is alleging the Pope told him, “God made you gay.” The allegation comes from Juan Carlos Cruz, one of the child victims of sexual abuse by Chilean clergy. The comment has quickly coiled around the world. Such a strong remark, from such a seat of moral and spiritual authority, would surely tighten the...

According to an article appearing in El Pais, the largest newspaper in Spain, Pope Francis said to a male sex abuse victim that: “God made you gay.” The comments were allegedly made during a meeting between Pope Francis and the victims of Chilean Catholic sex-offender priest Fernando Karadima. One of the men abused by the priest, former seminarian Juan Carlos Cruz, described his meeting with Pope Francis. Jesuit priest James Martin posted a link to the interview on his social media accounts which included a translation of one comment made by the Pope to Cruz: In his recently published book, “Building...

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...

In her Nobel Prize-winning book Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Svetlana Alexievich interviews scores of Russians who lament the loss of the Soviet Empire, even as they recount its horrors in excruciating detail. The Soviet Empire may have been barbaric, but at least they were great! The world feared them! They had defeated Hitler! (No thanks to the British and Americans.) Several unapologetic Soviets complain they lost their beloved empire without a shot. Why didn’t blood flow in the streets in her defense? They blame Mikhail Gorbachev. As one Soviet observes, the Communist system could withstand any challenge...

Editor's note: This analysis has been written by a priest who asked that it be published anonymously over concern of being disciplined for raising concerns about a papal document.May 14, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – I said it right from the beginning, when Amoris Laetitia was first published, with its infamous Chapter 8 that allows individual conscience to trump objective moral law and thus effectively eliminate the notion of intrinsic moral evil: The real issue is not Holy Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried. After all, Pope Francis had already streamlined the annulment process, to allow declarations of nullity which were...

I have some breaking news. Next year's Met Gala is going to have an 'Islam' theme. Yes, guests in 2019 will be encouraged to wear skimpy, provocative dresses that 'celebrate' the Prophet Mohammad, Islamic clothing including hijabs and burqas, and the Koran. I can also reveal that the 2020 Met Gala will have a 'Jewish' theme. Yes, a bunch of celebrities and models will be posing for the world's paparazzi dressed in all manner of Jewish attire and regalia, including dressing up as Rabbis and wearing kippahs. Oh, wait. Neither of these things is actually going to happen. In fact,...