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Editor’s note: the following is an exclusive interview with Cardinal Carlo Caffara, conducted by OnePeterFive’s Dr. Maike Hickson. Cardinal Caffarra is Archbishop emeritus of Bologna and former member of the Pontifical Council for the Family. It was in a letter to Cardinal Caffarra that Sister Lucia of Fatima revealed that “the final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.” Maike Hickson (MH): You have spoken, in a recent interview, about the papal exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and you have said that especially Chapter 8 is unclear and has already caused confusion even...

Conservative and liberal prelates in the Catholic Church have put forth sharply different readings of Pope Francis’ teaching on divorce—a situation complicated by the pontiff’s own ambiguity.

Tonight’s Guest: Author Dolly Kyle- Bill Clinton's Former girlfriend and lover. You are going to love this! Kyle! Kyle used to be Bill Clinton's girlfriend and lover. She was raped by Clinton's friend and had had her run-ins with Hillary. Kyle is going to expose Hillary and Bill and she's not afraid to do so! Make sure you have enough snacks and drink for this 2-hour episode. From WayneDupree.com: Dolly Kyle, long time friend of Bill Clinton and even former lover before and after his marriage, joined The Wayne Dupree Show on Friday night to discuss her book and her...

Archbishop Chaput has just come out with pastoral guidelines for the implementation of Amoris Laetitia (AL) in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The guidelines unswervingly maintain the Church’s bimillenial discipline precluding the admission to Confession and Holy Communion of public adulterers who divorce and civilly “remarry” and decline to cease their adulterous sexual relations: With divorced and civilly-remarried persons, Church teaching requires them to refrain from sexual intimacy. This applies even if they must (for the care of their children) continue to live under one roof. Undertaking to live as brother and sister is necessary for the divorced and civilly-remarried to...

Sister Lucia dos Santos, one of the three children who witnessed the Marian apparitions at Fatima, died in 2005. But before her death, she predicted that the final battle between Christ and Satan would be over marriage and the family. So says Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, who reports that the visionary sent him a letter with this prediction when he was Archbishop of Bologna, Italy. This reported statement by Sister Lucia, expressed during the pontificate of Saint John Paul II, was recently revisited by the Desde la Fe (From the Faith) weekly of the Archdiocese of Mexico, in the midst of...

Austrian Catholic website kath.net reports that on 7 July, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn published an interview in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, in which he said that Amoris Laetitia is a binding doctrinal document. From now on, says Schönborn, all the previous magisterial texts concerning marriage and the family “have to be read in the light of Amoris Laetitia.” Schönborn also said in this interview – a fuller excerpt of this text has now been published in English in the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica – that it is “obvious” that Amoris Laetitia is an act of the Magisterium since it...

By now we have been accustomed to the shocking results of Francis’ insistence on blathering to reporters during flights to or from the destinations of the useless papal trips that have become a primary activity of the post-Vatican II papacy. In the midst of all the blathering, however, there are also inadvertently revealing remarks that indicate the scope of the crisis-within-a-crisis that is the Bergoglian pontificate. The most recent example is the inflight press conference on the return to Rome from the papal trip to Armenia. A most revealing remark came in the context of a reporter’s question about key...

It seems that Pope Francis is determined to be more and more provocative with each passing week, as if to reveal deeper and deeper layers of what appears to be a liberal, seventies-era Latin American Jesuit’s constitutional disdain for the supposed “rigidity” of orthodox Catholicism. By now the whole world knows that on June 14, during his customary rambling remarks, this time at a “pastoral conference” at Saint John Lateran, Francis declared that “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null” because the spouses “don’t know what they say” when they say “Yes, for life.” He also dropped the...

Francis Claims Those Who Cohabitate Can Have the “Grace of a Real Marriage” The Martini Legacy Continues By John Vennari Our Lord commanded Peter to confirm his brethren in the Faith (Luke 22:32). Pope Francis delights in doing the opposite. On June 16, at a question and answer session during a conference in Rome, Pope Francis implied that those living in “faithful” cohabitation can have “the grace of real marriage because of their fidelity.” Contrary to Francis’ claim, however, cohabitation can never carry within it the grace of real marriage, because it is the grave of real marriage. Continuing his...

The Pope complained that some — incited by the media — go more or less out of the way of his countless discussions on the alarming state of the family in order to get tied up on a footnote on the topic of receiving holy Communion. But the pre-synodal public discussion revolved only once around this topic, because there is actually only a yes-or-no answer here. The debate was continued, and, indeed, equally controversial as before, because the Pope refused to quote his predecessors’ clear statements concerning this matter and because his answer is so obviously equivocal that everyone can...

The pope’s most recent comments on marriage point in a disturbing direction but let’s address two important matters first. Point One. Cohabitation is not marriage. Largely overlooked amid the furor caused by Pope Francis’ rash claim that “the great part of our sacramental marriages are null”—an assertion reckless if false (which it is) and brimming with despair if true (which it is not), a claim followed not by an apology, an official retraction, or even a bureaucratic ‘clarification’ but instead by an Orwellian alteration of the pope’s words in Vatican records—overlooked, I say, in this greater mess was the pope’s...

Pope Francis tore into priests who refuse to baptize the children of unwed mothers-- referring to them as "animals"-- during a June 16 meeting with participants in a Rome conference on the family. It is "pastoral cruelty" to refuse baptism, the Pope told the group, which was gathered at the basilica of St. John Lateran. In answer to a question about the message of his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, the Pope said that the Church should avoid "rigorism" in responding to the pastoral needs of Catholics in irregular marital unions. "The Gospel chooses another way," he said: "welcoming, accompanying, integrating,...

Prominent Catholic philosophers and a world expert on the Church Fathers have joined the growing chorus of voices expressing deep concerns over the implications of Pope Francis’s controversial exhortation Amoris Laetitia. “What was certain before has become problematic,” due to the pope’s signature ambiguity, wrote Dr. Jude P. Dougherty, the dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, in a column at The Wanderer. The seeming “internal waffling” going on inside the Church over the issue of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried is undermining the Church’s moral authority, Dougherty wrote, at a time...

Last Friday, Steve Skojec reported on the eloquent and piercing response written by the German-speaking professor, Josef Seifert, as published by Professor de Mattei’s website Corrispondenza Romana. It seems that more and more conservative Catholics are taking heart and seeing it necessary to raise their own voices in opposition to the direction in which Pope Francis is now trying to take the Catholic Church. Now we have learned that another well-known U.S. philosopher and former dean of the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, Jude P. Dougherty, published a similar critique on 1 June in the Catholic...

In a recent article for the Italian news platform “Corrispondenza Romana”, renowned Catholic philosopher Josef Seifert strongly criticizes Pope Francis for statements in his recent Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Seifert, a longtime ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and a close associate of St. John Paul II, explains that he criticizes the document because instead of invoking joy – as stated in the exhortation title – the papal document would actually make Jesus and his mother cry. Many of the passages which seem merciful turn the teachings of the Church on their heads, according to Seifert. “In my...

The stunning introduction to today’s official Vatican Radio report on Pope Francis’ morning homily reads: “Pope Francis warned on Thursday against an excessive rigidity, saying those within the Church who tell us ‘it’s this or nothing’ are heretics and not Catholics. His remarks came during the morning Mass on Thursday celebrated at the Santa Marta residence.” The specific section of the homily referred to in the opening is as follows: This (is the) healthy realism of the Catholic Church: the Church never teaches us ‘or this or that.’ That is not Catholic. The Church says to us: ‘this and that.’...

During Pope Francis’s first Angelus address after ascending to the chair of Peter, he approvingly cited Walter Cardinal Kasper’s book Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (2012), saying that he had read it recently and it had done him “much good.” Since that papal audience, Francis has spoken frequently about God’s mercy, even calling an Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy and issuing a book-length interview, The Name of God is Mercy: A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli (2016). Cardinal Kasper has also played a prominent role in discussions about how to extend mercy in the...

The dazzling critique by an Australian scholar on the post-synodal exhortation. “We have lost all foothold, and fallen like Alice into a parallel universe, where nothing is quite what it seems to be” by Sandro Magister ROME, June 7, 2016 - Keep an eye on the author of the volume above, the first critical version of a masterpiece by Saint Basil the Great lost in the original Greek but come down to us in an ancient Syrian version attested to in five manuscripts, published two years ago by the historical publisher Brill, active in Holland since the 17th century. The...

In a response to The Remnant’s Chris Ferrara (“An Open Letter to Bishop Athanasius Schneider“; May 10, 2016), Bishop Athanasius Schneider has not backed off of his existing criticism of Amoris Laetitia, but rather, has encouraged further resistance to it:

Dear Mr. Matt: Thank you for your greetings. I wrote an answer to The Remnant‘s Open Letter, which I send to you in the attachment and you can publish. God bless abundantly you and your apostolate for the Catholic faith. With cordial greetings in Jesus and Mary, + Athanasius Schneider Dear Mr. Christopher A. Ferrara: On May 9, 2016 you published on “The Remnant” website an open letter to me regarding the question of the Apostolic Exhortation “Amoris laetitia”. As a bishop, I am grateful and at the same time encouraged to receive from a Catholic layman such a clear...