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The day after my column on Phil Lawler's cri de cœur concerning "This Disastrous Pontificate" appeared, another voice from the mainstream, citing Lawler's piece, has joined the growing chorus of mainstream alarm about the rapid acceleration and threatened train wreck of the Bergoglio Express. Thomas Peters at catholicvote.org posted an article entitled "This Papacy is in Crisis and in Need of Urgent Prayer this Lent." Peters states the simple, undeniable truth: "The papacy is meant to unite the Church, not divide it. Almost four years into the papacy of Pope Francis, the division his teaching (or lack of teaching) is...

The Vatican Cardinal tasked with interpreting Church law is defending a book he published last month in which he says Catholics in so-called irregular unions “must be given” Holy Communion. Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, President of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legal Texts, told National Catholic Register’s Ed Pentin that when he spoke to Pope Francis “about these questions […] we always thought the same.” In his 30 page book titled The Eighth Chapter of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Coccopalmerio stated that the “sacraments of Reconciliation and Communion ought to be given also to so-called wounded families...

Where does one even begin to deal with the heresy and apostasy of this Francesco Cardinal Coccopalmerio of the Holy Catholic Church? In former days, the Pope would have called him in to the Papal Apartment, made him kneel before him and strip him of his red hat and send him off to a monastery. Today, we have neither a Pope that respects his Office and Apartment, nor the Truth of the Faith in order to defend it from a heresiarch such as this. Not only has this man now attempted to defend the heresy of his "book" on Holy...

Think of a woman who lives with a married man. She has three little children. She has already been with this man for 10 years. Now the children think of her as a mother. He, the partner, is very much anchored to this woman, as a lover, as a woman. If this woman were to say: “I am leaving this mistaken union because I want to correct my life, but if I did this, I would harm the children and the partner,” then she might say: “I would like to, but I cannot.” In precisely these cases, based on one’s...

The bishops of Malta have issued an invitation to Catholics on the island nation to show “mercy and pastoral discernment” to those living in difficult family situations. In a letter, to be read out in churches all over Malta and Gozo, the two Bishops Charles Scicluna and Mario Grech explain that they have recently issued guidelines for priests, aimed at accompanying couples and families “in complex situations, especially those involving separated or divorced persons who have entered a new union”. The bishops say that although these people may have “lost their first marriage”, many of them “have not lost their...

In Christian life, truth is not negotiable. There is no doubt. However, we must be fair in mercy and not think of faith only in terms of “you can” or “you cannot.” This is what Jesus teaches us. Pope Francis begins his homely in Casa Santa Marta by warning of a hypocrite and deceitful faith when reduced to the logic of classification. Reports radio Vatican: today’s Gospel, February 24 2017, by St. Mark San Marco reads the question “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”. This question was asked to the son of God by the doctors...

On 14 February, Steve Skojec reported on his own attempts to receive, in justice, some clarifications – specific and unambiguous ones – concerning steps now to be taken by the Archdiocese of Newark with regard to the outspoken and conservative Catholic priest, Father Peter West. (My family has known Father West personally and has cherished him for his gentleness and radiant kindness). As it now turns out, however, the speaker for the Archdiocese evaded and then declined to give any further details as to the standing “protocols” and the canonical grounds upon which Father West will now be dealt with....

Recently Pope Francis's "C9" council of cardinal advisers issued a statement supporting the pope in light of recent attacks, and the intent was clearly noble. It's worth pondering, however, if it could have unintended consequences, including pressuring other bishops to follow suit. Generally speaking, you know a manager is in trouble when somebody has to put out a statement expressing “full confidence” in his or her leadership. If a corporate board does that for the CEO, it’s usually a sure sign of either scandal or a drop in profits; if a sports franchise owner does it for the coach, it...

The obscurity with which Pope Francis loves to speak and write on the most controversial questions is one of the constants of his magisterium, an obscurity that reached its summit in the response that he gave on November 15, 2015 to a Lutheran woman married to a Catholic, who was asking him if she too could receive communion at Mass: > Sì, no, non so, fate voi. Le linee guida di Francesco per l'intercomunione con i luterani But the doubts over his real thought are promptly dispelled by the personalities and interpreters closest to him, cardinals, bishops, theologians, Jesuits, journalists....

This morning there was to have been an eagerly anticipated press conference featuring Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, answering questions about his recently published pamphlet endorsing the "liberal" interpretation of Amoris Laetitia. However, Cardinal Coccopalmerio failed to show up, pleading a "diary clash." This was later explained as a conflict with a meeting at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. In his short work, published by the official Vatican publishing house on February 8, Coccopalmerio had argued that all the sacraments including communion should be open to those "living in situations not in...

What in the world is going on in Rome this week? First the Vatican press office issues a statement from the Council of Cardinals, supporting the Pope. It would certainly be news if the Council of Cardinals did not support the Pope. But why was this statement newsworthy? Why did the Council thank the Pontiff in February for a speech he delivered to the Roman Curia in December? Is there any way to see this message as something other than damage control—as a bid to reassure the world that the increasingly evident tensions within the Catholic hierarchy are not tearing...

The Maltese bishops' guidelines on Communion mean that secular culture has triumphed over the Church It has been a long time since I last wrote on this site. I am only breaking my silence now because I am so distressed to find the unmistakeable signs that the Church is in the midst of a crisis. The crisis is proceeding almost absent-mindedly under its own momentum, but its nature is clear: the secularist ideologisation of the moral sense. Even more distressing, it is Malta of all places in the world where its signs are most unignorable – and given my personal...

LifeSiteNews has just brought the attention of the Anglophone Catholic world to what was first reported by the French journal Le Figaro: “as many as thirty cardinals expressed their reservations to Pope Francis about his Exhortation Amoris Laetitia [AL] prior to its April 2016 release” and that “writing to Francis either individually or in small groups, [they] attempted last year to dissuade the pope from releasing Amoris. They warned that it would not only weaken the Church’s teaching on marriage, but on the Eucharist and confession as well…” In other words, some thirty cardinals warned the Pope that, should it...

Bishops in Malta have published a document on applying Amoris Laetitia, the apostolic exhortation on family released by Pope Francis last year. The bishops’ document reflects the pope’s call for more mercy and inclusion in the church, all of which is applicable to LGBT issues. In the document, “Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia,” Maltese Bishops Charles Scicluna and Mario Grech primarily addressed the situation of Catholics who are divorced and civilly remarried. Yet the principles they laid out are transferable to LGBT Catholics and their loved ones, too. Released on the Feast of the Epiphany,...

Bishop Mario Grech of Gozo, a Maltese island, has allegedly threatened priests that he will suspend them a divinis if they refuse Holy Communion to the divorced and civilly "remarried". The German website Katholisches reports that Bishop Mario Grech announced his decision to impose this canonical punishment immediately on returning from Rome. Bishop Mario Grech is the co-signatory with Archbishop Charles Scicluna of the document, "Criteria for the Application of Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia". Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Bishop Mario Grech have instructed priests to allow the divorced and civilly "remarried", who are sexually active despite the existence of...

3 prelates appeal to prayer: "That Pope Francis may confirm the unchanging praxis of the Church with regard to the truth of the indissolubility of marriage" Note: We were asked to promote the following text and prayer with you, our readers, and ask you and other media to please share it far and wide. It was written by Tomash Peta, Metropolitan Archbishop of the archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana; Jan Pawel Lenga, Archbishop-Bishop emeritus of Karaganda; and Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana: Following the publication of the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris laetitia, in...

Each week I resolve to devote this column to something other than the Bergoglian pontificate, but each week a new development makes that impossible. For Pope Francis is in the process of making history – and not in a good way. Witness the recent publication of “guidelines” for “the application of Chapter Eight of Amoris Laetitia” — note well: Chapter 8 — by the bishops of once Catholic Malta. Based entirely on Amoris Laetitia (AL), the Maltese bishops now declare that the floodgates are open to Holy Communion for literally any divorced and “remarried” person who persuades himself that he...

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently published a widely circulated commentary on the recent fall-out from Amoris Laetitia entitled, “The End of Catholic Marriage”. In it, he argued persuasively that if Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marital love comes to be generally interpreted and applied as liberally as it has been in the Diocese of San Diego, California, it will in effect mean the death of this sacrament as the Gospel of Christ and the Catholic Church have always presented it: a sacred covenant whose indissoluble character means that remarriage after divorce constitutes adultery – a violation of the...

When highly placed Italian prelates declare that “only a blind man cannot see” that confusion is the ecclesiastical order of the day, and that such confusion has as its fundamental source Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia, matters have reached crisis level. Catholics who have not followed the intense three-year debate over (among other things) admitting to holy Communion divorced-and-remarried Catholics who are living as married persons should stop reading this post and go get caught up on current events. But for those sufficiently aware of the doctrinal and disciplinary issues at stake I offer some observations in the wake of this...

If, as a result of the process of discernment, undertaken with “humility, discretion and love for the Church and her teaching, in a sincere search for God’s will and a desire to make a more perfect response to it” (AL 300), a separated or divorced person who is living in a new relationship manages, with an informed and enlightened conscience, to acknowledge and believe that he or she are at peace with God, he or she cannot be precluded from participating in the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist (see AL, notes 336 and 351). I wonder what would happen...