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Bishop Athanasius Schneider has said priests have to follow the Church’s constant practice on Communion, even if their bishops and religious superiors command them to do otherwise.In an interview with the website One Peter Five, Bishop Schneider, an auxiliary bishop in Kazakhstan, encouraged Catholics to “remain faithful to the unchanging and constant teaching and practice of the entire Church”.In the aftermath of Pope Francis’s exhortation Amoris Laetitia, bishops’ conferences have released different guidelines on Communion. Some have reaffirmed the Church’s traditional practice, that the divorced and remarried can only receive Communion if they resolve to live “as brother and sister”....

Today’s announcement comes after significant changes at the Institute, including the appointments last year of Archbishop Paglia as grand chancellor, and Msgr. Pierangelo Sequeri, as dean. Both are known to support a much criticized interpretation of Amoris Laetitia which would allow some remarried divorcees to receive Holy Communion, as well as being supportive of a softening of the teaching of Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s ban on artificial contraception. Scholars also within the John Paul II Institute itself have criticized both stances as diametrically opposed to the teachings of St. John Paul II.

One year ago to this day, four Cardinals submitted five yes-or-no questions to Pope Francis asking him if his 2016 exhortation on marriage and the family — Amoris Laetitia — conforms to perennial Catholic teaching on marriage, moral absolutes, conscience, and the sacraments.  The Pope has refused to answer their questions, despite the moral and pastoral chaos that ensued throughout the whole of Christendom as priests, bishops, and cardinals interpreted his teachings in completely contradictory ways. Some allowed civilly-divorced-and-remarried Catholics living in habitual adultery to receive Holy Communion. Some did not.  Today, on the first anniversary of the dubia, has...

The Roman Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family, founded by John Paul II to defend the indissolubility of Christian marriage and to fight abortion, has been abolished in its present form by Pope Francis through a recent motu proprio. The institute will now be called "John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences". It had incurred Francis' wrath because of its defense of Catholic doctrine during the Synod of the Family, although Francis excluded the institute from the work of the Synod. Now, Francis wishes that the institute propagates his controversial document Amoris Laetitia that relativizes the...

Pope Francis told a group of newly ordained bishops that “authentic discernment” cannot be reduced to repeating “rigid” moral formulas to persons whose situations “can’t be reduced to black and white.” Discernment, the pope said, “can’t be reduced to repeating formulas such as ‘high clouds send little rain’ to a concrete person, who’s often immersed in a reality that can’t be reduced to black and white.” He cautioned bishops against being “imprisoned by nostalgia for being able to give just one answer to apply in all cases,” adding that discernment is an “antidote against rigidity, because the same solutions aren’t...

After Dubia Cardinal Carlo Caffarra's death on the first day of the Apostolic Journey to Colombia, Pope Francis let the journalists, who accompanied him, know, that he would not accept any question regarding Caffarra during the press conference in the plane on his way back to Rome. The Italian blog Anonimi della Croce writes, that Francis was afraid of the question why he did not answer the doubts ("dubia") of the four Cardinals concerning his controversial document Amoris Laetitia.

María Clemencia Rodríguez Múnera, 61, the adulterous wife of Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos published on Twitter a video showing how Pope Francis, during his Columbia trip, blesses her and her adulterous husband. She writes, "Your Holiness, thank you for blessing our marriage ❤." Rodríguez and Santos entered a civil marriage in 1987. Both were married before. Santos belongs to a well-established, influential family of Colombia. He is a strong supporter of gay pseudo-marriage. Twitter user Carlos Sanchez comments, "The successor of Peter blesses the successors of Judas, tyrants who deceive the Colombian people." Another user, Carlos A. Sierra...

A divorce coach who charges $2,500 a session to advise women how to leave their husbands has insisted she is not a “marriage wrecker.” Single Emma Heptonstall ditched her high-flying job as a lawyer and set herself up as a self-proclaimed “divorce alchemist” — teaching mainly women, but occasionally men, how to have “happy splits.” The 44-year-old said: “I’m the divorce alchemist for ladies who leave. I know some people think I am not in a position to advise, having never been married, but I think that makes me objective.” “I’m not going to compare my situation with other people’s...

Two-star Maj. Gen. Joseph Harrington has been suspended by the Army for sending suggestive messages to an enlisted soldier’s wife, USA Today reported Friday. Harrington is the commander of U.S. forces in Africa and is based in Italy. Harrington allegedly sent private Facebook messages such as “U can be my nurse” and “How often does your devil vixen come out?” to the woman between March and June, Stars and Stripes reported. She gave the messages to an advocacy groupm which made them available to media outlets. Former Air Force judge and President of Protect Our Defenders Don Christensen said the...

Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia “seems to” go in the direction of a pastoral “discernment” that “allows the adulterers to continue in adultery,” says Bishop Athanasius Schneider. The consequences for many could be eternal damnation, Schneider warned. “We cannot play with our eternity. As the Proverb said, ‘We cannot play with fire.’” And the pope bears “grave responsibility” for this situation, the auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, said during a recent Tradition, Faith and Property conference in Poland. The bishop was responding to the question of how priests should apply the principle of “discernment” laid out in Amoris Laetitia...

Amoris Laetitia’s condonation of situation ethics via “discernment” of “concrete situations” among those living in adulterous “second marriages” threatens “to destroy the entire moral teaching of the Church” as a matter of “pure logic,” to quote the renowned philosopher Josef Siefert. Now there are rumors — well-founded Roman rumors, which tend to be true — of a coming application of the same “discernment” model to the Church’s teaching on the intrinsic evil of contraception. Siefert’s concern centers on paragraph 303 of Amoris Laetitia (AL), wherein the following astonishing proposition is put forth: “Yet conscience can do more than recognize that...

At least five of the 28 new members of the Pontifical Academy for Life are critical of Catholic doctrines reaffirmed in Humanae Vitae. Reporting for the National Catholic Register, journalist Ed Pentin identified the dissenters as Monsignor Pierangelo Sequeri; Anne-Marie Pelletier; Father Alain Thomasset, SJ; Father Maurizio Chiodi; and Father Humberto Miguel Yanez, SJ. A potential sixth, Father Carlo Casalone, SJ, has also been appointed to the Academy. A specialist in aesthetic theology and musicology, Sequeri was appointed president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family by Pope Francis. As president, he is...

Is this intimidation fair? Is it Christian or Diabolical? There was an early stage in this pontificate when the Holy Father was convinced that all good men and true knew, deep down, that the Church's marriage discipline needed changing. All that was needed was for the Synod Fathers to speak boldly the Bergoglian Truth that was really in all their hearts. During this period, Papa Bergoglio made incessant calls for Parrhesia: for courageous boldness in speaking out. This was the period in which his friend and ghostwriter 'Tucho' Fernandez was memorably heard to say "He means, Mueller [then Prefect of...

Facebook / Knisja Santa Marija ta' Ġesù BlogsCatholic Church Fri Aug 25, 2017 - 3:06 pm EST amoris laetitia , catholic , catholic church , crisis in the catholic church , malta MALTA, August 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – In what could be considered symbolic of the state of the Catholic Church in Malta, or even most of Europe, the ceiling of the country's oldest Catholic church mysteriously collapsed this week. Malta legalized same-sex "marriage" this summer with practically no opposition from the country's bishops. This happened just months after Mata's bishops broke away from perennial Catholic teaching to allow couples...

The question in the title of this paper is addressed to Pope Francis and to all Catholic cardinals, bishops, philosophers and theologians. It deals with a dubium about a purely logical consequence of an affirmation in Amoris Laetitia, and ends with a plea to Pope Francis to retract at least one affirmation of AL, if the title question of this little essay has to be answered in the affirmative, and if indeed from this one affirmation in AL alone pure logic, using evident premises, can deduce the destruction of the entire Catholic moral teaching. In a Socratic style, the paper...

Below is a Spanish to English translation of the Vatican's website: https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/es/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160905_regione-pastorale-buenos-aires.html

This week, one of Pope Francis' most trusted confidants, Archbishop Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández, author of Heal Me With Your Mouth: The Art of Kissing, and an alleged ghostwriter of Amoris Laetitia, published a stunning defense of adultery in Medellín, the theology journal of the Latin-American Bishops’ Conference, in an essay entitled "Chapter VIII of Amoris Laetitia: What is left after the storm". Key to Fernandez's argument is the pope's approval of the Buenos Aires guidelines on AL, which the Vatican recently published on its official website. In an article that provides key insights into the mind of Pope Francis,...

When is fornication not really fornication?Well, if reports are accurate, according to Archbishop Victor Manuel Fernandez, dubbed by some as Pope Francis’ “closest theological adviser,” if a sexually active, unmarried couple lives together, he says it is “licit to ask” whether such sexual activity “should always fall, in its integral meaning, within the negative precept of ‘fornication.’”I’ll go out on a moral-theological limb at this point—yes, Your Excellency. Yes, such sexual activity should indeed always fall within the negative precept of “fornication.”Ah, but I haven’t been patient enough to hear him out more fully. He has more to say....

One of Malta’s two bishops recently criticized individuals opposed to the bishops’ guidelines giving tacit approval of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, calling them “prophets of doom.” Gozo Bishop Mario Grech said these doomsters want to affirm God’s justice by controlling his mercy, the Times of Malta reported. And he said they negatively affect the Church, stating, “Attitudes of this type annihilate all hope in people and make the Church what it is not, and what it should never be.” The article said his “prophets of doom” comments were in reference to the new way of dealing with divorced...

WHY PARAGRAPH 301 OF AMORIS LAETITIA IS SO PROFOUNDLY TROUBLING “When it is a matter of the moral norms prohibiting intrinsic evil, there are no privileges or exceptions for anyone. It makes no difference whether one is the master of the world or the “poorest of the poor” on the face of the earth. Before the demands of morality we are all absolutely equal.” (Saint Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, no. 96) Here is the very troubling passage from Amoris Laetitia (no. 301) which clearly suggests that a person can be in a “concrete situation” where he has no choice but to...