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Yesterday, Archbishop Blase Cupich began his tenure as the Archdiocese of Chicago’s 9th prelate. My wife and I were blessed a few weeks ago to attend one final young adult “Pub Night” with the archbishop before he vacated his seat as Bishop of the Diocese of Spokane, where he spoke on the Pope’s encyclical “Joy of the Gospel” and took questions from the audience on anything and everything. Lots of people have been saying lots of things about Pope Francis’ recent selection – good and bad, Christian and un-Christian, smart and dumb – but at the end of the day,...

Featured Term (selected at random:ELDERS The older men in a community acting as a governing body (I Samuel 16:4). The Sanhedrin, for instance, was made up of elders (Exodus 3:16). they were mentioned in Matthew as joining the chief priests in challenging Jesus during his ministry (Matthew 27:12). The traditional system carried over into Christian communities. The Apostles appointed elders to take charge of each church (Acts 14:23). According to the Council of Trent, the elders mentioned by St. James as administrators of the sacrament of anointing (James 5:14) "does not refer to the older men nor to the more...

A Reflection on Perhaps the “Meanest” and Most Shocking Thing Jesus Ever Said By: Msgr. Charles PopeThe Gospel from today’s Mass (Wed. of the 33rd Week – Luke 19:11-27) is known as the “Parable of the Ten Gold Coins.” It is similar to Matthew’s “Parable of the Talents” from Sunday, but with certain significant differences and an ending so shocking that, when I read it at daily Mass some years ago, a young child said audibly to her mother, “Wow, that’s mean!”I’d like to take a look at it and ponder its shocking ending.As I said, the parable is similar...

Cardinal Raymond Burke has urged Pope Francis to take the issues of Communion for the divorced and remarried, cohabitation and same-sex marriage “off the table” for next year’s Synod of Bishops. Addressing more than 300 delegates at a family and marriage conference, organised by Catholic Voice, in Limerick on November 15, the American cardinal said these issues had distracted the work of the synod in its first session in October. Warning that Satan was sowing confusion and error about matrimony, the cardinal patron of the Knights of Malta said, “Even within the church there are those who would obscure the...

November 19, 2014Wednesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time    Reading 1 Rv 4:1-11 I, John, had a vision of an open door to heaven,and I heard the trumpetlike voicethat had spoken to me before, saying,“Come up here and I will show you what must happen afterwards.”At once I was caught up in spirit. A throne was there in heaven, and on the throne sat onewhose appearance sparkled like jasper and carnelian.Around the throne was a halo as brilliant as an emerald.Surrounding the throne I saw twenty-four other throneson which twenty-four elders sat,dressed in white garments and with...

Discredited pedophile priests in the Catholic Church are outsourced to countries where no prosecution takes place, a commentator tells Press TV. “A lot of the pedophiles who discredit themselves in more advanced white countries, where they’ll be prosecuted, are outsourced to rape, molest and abuse non-white black, brown people – And the church needs to confront its long history of racism,” Randy Short, a human rights activist said in an interview with Press TV from Washington on Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A man who accused a high-ranking Roman Catholic monsignor in Los Angeles of molestation said Wednesday he is furious that an internal Vatican tribunal recently exonerated the priest. *snip* “They [the church] never contacted me for anything. It just infuriates me,” he said. “They’re laughing in my face.”

Nancy Meyers remembers the fear in the priest's eyes when he spotted her. It was a Sunday morning in 1990, and Nancy, then 42, and her sister Kate had just arrived at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Lino Lakes to confront the man Nancy says had sexually abused her as a child. The Rev. Kenneth LaVan was greeting parishioners at the back of the church. "Can I help you?" a parishioner asked. "Oh, no," Kate Meyers said. "We're here to see Father LaVan, it's just a quick thing. He knows us. We're old friends." When the sisters got to the...

“[O]ften men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator. [...] By the proclamation of the Gospel… [the Church] gives [non-Christians] the dispositions necessary for baptism, snatches them from the slavery of error and of idols and incorporates them in Christ…” Sound like something from the superstitious medieval Church? Actually, it’s a quote from the Second Vatican Council (Lumen gentium, 16-17; promulgated in 1964).

I read on the blog of His Hermeneuticalness the very apposite suggestion to pray the rosary without being discouraged by the fact that one is easily distracted. Not only do I commend the attitude, but will also bore you with a couple of added personal reflections. 1. I have been praying the Rosary (five decades) every day for many years now. I will not tell you that I do not get distracted. But this I will tell you: that my desire to pray has greatly increased. It did not happen in one day. It's not that one starts praying the...

Catalog of Sin – All Items are in Stock, Free Shipping and Handling from the Supplier By: Msgr. Charles PopeThe video at the bottom of the page is something of a spoof on drug commercials, treating sin like a drug. Wait till you hear the side-effects disclaimer at the end. I also thought today of doing a little post on the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance since I was talking to a parishioner today, who is suffering because his employer has not paid him for three weeks. The employer, a shipping agency says this is  due to “administrative...

Featured Term (selected at random:QUARANTINE According to the ancient Church, a rigorous fast of forty days. It was an ecclesiastical penalty imposed by a confessor. Later on it came to be applied to partial indulgences and meant that the amount of temporal punishment removed was equivalent to that remitted by the ancient canonical penalty. However, the term is no longer applied to indulgences. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Polish Bishops' Conference President: communion for "remarried" divorcees attacks indissolubility of marriage. Curiously enough, Archbishop Gadecki, of Poznan, President of the Polish Episcopal Conference, whose presence and firmness were so important in the October Synod, repeats the same line mentioned by Cardinal George in his interview to John Allen: the differences are becoming so wide within the Church, the division so stark, we are not talking anymore about "liberals" or "conservatives" or left and right, but about what is true and what is false, about those who are faithful or unfaithful to the Magisterium. In the Church, this is the line...

November 18, 2014Tuesday of the Thirty-third Week in Ordinary Time    Reading 1 Rv 3:1-6, 14-22 I, John, heard the Lord saying to me:“To the angel of the Church in Sardis, write this: “‘The one who has the seven spirits of Godand the seven stars says this: “I know your works,that you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.Be watchful and strengthen what is left, which is going to die,for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.Remember then how you accepted and heard; keep it, and repent.If you are not...

The Incarnational Drama of the Our Father Stephen BealeThere once was an Eastern Church spiritual adviser who suggested beginning the Our Father backwards.We should begin with the last petition so that we end with Our Father, he said. Such is the pathway to Easter: from temptation in the desert to forgiveness and manna in the desert to our arrival in the promised land—so goes the thinking in an anecdote Pope Benedict XVI recounts in Jesus of Nazareth.There is some sense to this: we often approach God in prayer in times of temptation, to seek deliverance, to ask for a...

If one wants a reason why Synod special secretary Abp. Bruno Forte, a man currently very close to the Pope and one of his closest advisers, suffered a major defeat in this week's assembly of the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI) in the election for Vice-President representing Central Italy (including the Latium...), one must only look at what was going on inside the assembly halls in Assisi, as Marco Tosatti reports below. Despite John Allen's spin to the contrary as not a big deal, the most ultra-liberal of Italian Vaticanists, Marco Politi, was right to identify it as a major message...

Local Catholics Honor Sacrifice And Celebrate Vietnamese Unity A colorful procession outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown L.A. celebrates martyrs and the birth of Catholicism in Vietnam. (Francine Orr) By ANH DO Honoring Catholic saints and celebrating the religion's birth in Vietnam Before Mass, the faithful draped in gleaming headdresses and silk garments turned to welcome an ancient symbol of their modern faith: the bones of three saints who sacrificed their lives for their religion, cementing Roman Catholicism in Vietnam. Men carry a relic, containing bones of three saints, in a procession during the reunion...

Although it had been well known for months, Pope Francis made his travel plans official this morning. The pontiff will make his first visit to the US in September 2015 at the World Meeting of Families, part of the lengthy conversation about the pastoral direction of the Catholic Church that officially began with the Extraordinary Synod last month. Rome Reports has the video of the announcement, thankfully with subtitles for the Italian-challenged, which still includes me:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO When I was in Rome last month, this was already assumed to be on the calendar. Vatican officials...

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph 1:3). I never even considered salvation in Christ because I did not even know about it. Suicide, not salvation, was my way out. It was the Lord’s desire that I be saved before I was born! What a blessing! Ephesians 1:4 says that each believer was chosen before the foundation of the world, “According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame...

What is “The Art of Accompaniment”? Some Concerns About Another Phrase Emerging From the Synod By: Msgr. Charles PopeOne of the events at last week’s meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was a first-hand summary of the Roman (extraordinary) Synod on the family by several bishops who attended. It would appear, as related by Archbishop Kurtz,  that a certain expression emerged at the Synod that is meant to convey a kind of pastoral strategy. That phrase is the “art of accompaniment.” Of itself, the phrase both makes sense and has value. In life, we must all learn, individually and collectively,...