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A historic gathering of Orthodox Churches has opened on the Greek island of Crete, despite the absence of four denominations including the Russians. The Holy and Great Council had been billed as the first meeting of fellow Church leaders since 787 AD. The Russians decided to stay away after the Churches of Antioch, Bulgaria and Georgia refused to take part after disputes about the meeting. The council, which began on Sunday, has been 55 years in preparation. It will run until 27 June. On Sunday morning, clerics attending the council celebrated Orthodox Pentecost in the Cretan town of Heraklion, the...

David Paskin staged a walkout during Trump's speech at AIPAC. Two months later, his contract with Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens was unexpectedly not renewed. A Florida rabbi must leave his pulpit after his protest of Donald Trump’s speech at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference riled congregants. David Paskin, who serves as rabbi of the Conservative Temple Beth David synagogue in the south Florida city of Palm Beach Gardens, will leave his position in July. In March, Paskin was one of a group of Conservative rabbis who led a protest of Trump’s speech at the...

Jan Markell and Eric Barger spend the hour with Phil Haney, author of “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad.” As a DHS employee, he witnessed the government’s execution of a hands-off policy to protect Muslims and put Americans at risk. He has now blown the whistle with this stunning expose’. We are reminded that only God is our homeland security director.

Pope Francis has said the "great majority" of Catholic marriages being celebrated today are invalid because couples do not fully realize it is a lifetime commitment, drawing sharp criticism from Church conservatives. The pope, who has come under fire before for making spontaneous comments about doctrinal matters, was speaking at a question-and-answer session with priests, nuns and parish workers on Thursday night in a Rome basilica. "We are living in a provisional culture," Francis said in response to a man who spoke of "the crisis of marriage" and asked how the Church could better prepare young couples. "Because of this,...

June 17, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The official Vatican transcript of controversial remarks made by Pope Francis this week, in which he speculated that the “great majority” of Catholic marriages are in fact invalid, significantly alters his words. While a video of the pope’s remarks show clearly that he used the Italian words “grande maggioranza” (great majority) to indicate the proportion of marriages that he believes are “null,” the official Vatican transcript changes those words to the more measured “parte” – i.e. a part, portion, or some. Yahoo News reports that a Vatican spokesperson stated that the Pope’s words may at...

By Philip Cottraux Two tragic events occurred last weekend. I am not into pop culture and had never really seen “The Voice.” The first time I had ever heard of Christina Grimmie was learning of her death on the news. And yet something was heart-wrenching about it. The media has been claiming they can find no motivation for the attack, that her killer was an obsessed lunatic. While that may be true, I have also seen reports that have been largely ignored by the press claiming this beautiful young girl was shot for being a Christian.* Upon further research, I...

While the IRS revoked the non-profit status of the George Soros-subsidized Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) in October 2013 for failing to file a form 990 for three consecutive years, the organization recently re-emerged with a progressive voter guide for the November presidential elections. For A Revolution of Tenderness: A 2016 Election Pope Francis Voter Guide, CACG collaborated with other progressive groups—including the Soros-supported Faith in Public Life Catholic Program, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Pax Christi International, and others—to produce a voter guide that claims to “show how we apply the teachings of our Church...

We here in America have witnessed over the last past 50 years the EXPONENTIAL disintegration of the family unit and its catastrophic tsunami of violent physiological effects on our nation’s citizenry. From this disintegration and devastation has come most of the horrific social consequences in which we as a nation shall NEVER recover. The question that must be asked is, “Where is the God honoring father today in the “Land of the Free?” Well, America's culture has replaced the father by marriage to the mother with the "Baby's Daddy" and countless women are selling themselves to this immoral practice only...

Chaos Frank opened his trap again... Francis: “Great Majority” of Marriages today are Invalid because People don’t realize it’s indissoluble — but “Fidelity” in Cohabitation = Real Marriage! [UPDATE 17-JUN-2016 18:01 UTC: Vatican edits official transcript, changes Francis’ actual words “a great majority of” into “part of”. In either case, however, the fundamental problem remains: Francis believes sacramental marriages are invalid if people do not know or understand that marriage is permanent for life — how many such cases there actually are, is insignificant; the point is that Francis admits the principle! And he furthermore believes that fornication with only...

So far, the answer seems to be 'yes' Since the late ’70s, some of the most reliable voters for Republican candidates have been Christians who take the Bible literally — conservative Christians, we’ll call them. About 65 percent vote Republican now, and they typically turn out in large numbers for elections, said Andrew Lewis, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati. Will they do so this year, when the Republican standard-bearer is Donald Trump, a not particularly religious person whose support for the pro-life movement has been lukewarm at best? The short answer is yes, said Lewis, who...

Last time a ranking prelate (Cdl. Kasper) opined that half of all marriages were null his attribution of such a reckless assertion to Pope Francis himself could be dismissed as hearsay, deflected as referring to marriage in general and not Christian marriage in particular, or at least minimized as describing merely ‘many’ or even ‘half’ of all marriages. But none of those qualifications can be applied to blunt the impact of the pope’s startling claim “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null”.If last time was bad, this time is very bad. Consider: Marriage is that natural human relationship...

Patriarch Bartholomew urges fellow leaders to attend Pan-Orthodox CouncilEcumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has called on his brother patriarchs and primates of the Orthodox churches to honour their commitments and join him for the Great and Holy Council of the Orthodox Church. Four of the churches – the Antiochian, Bulgarian, Georgian and Russian Orthodox – announced they would not attend the gathering scheduled for June 19-26 on the Greek island of Crete. The patriarchs and primates of the 14 autocephalous or self-governing Orthodox churches met in Switzerland in January and voted unanimously to convene the Council, which would be the...

Pilgrims who visit next Easter will be able to see the extraordinary work that has been done to the roof, walls and 900-year-old mosaics.BETHLEHEM — Christians planning on making a Holy Land pilgrimage — for many, a once-in-a-lifetime journey — may want to wait until Easter 2017, when the scaffolding used to restore the ancient Church of the Nativity is expected to come down. While the $15-million repair, conservation and restoration of the church, which is revered as the site of Jesus’ birth, will not be absolutely completed for another couple of years, due to a funding gap, pilgrims who...

Mark Twain would have understood the protest of Yogi Berra: “Most of the things I said I didn’t say.” To Twain, with no evidence, is attributed: “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.” The source of the quotation is debated as is the source of the Nile, but the meaning is as valid as the river is wet. Denial is the typical first stage of learning that one is dying, and that applies to our culture. It certainly is so of Christian culture in many places, sometimes the result of lassitude as in Europe and harshly so in...

The president of the Sisters of Loretto has expressed surprise that she has been summoned to the Vatican to discuss several “areas of concern” regarding her order. This summons was contained in a letter from the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL) to Sister Pearl McGivney, the president of the Loretto Sisters. She informed the order’s members about the summons in a June 1 letter that was leaked to the National Catholic Reporter. The Reporter’s June 9 article stated that the summons “may raise questions” for other U.S. sisters because the Vatican “has at...

THE HOLY SYNOD OF BISHOPS OF THE SERBIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH Syn. No. 840 15th June 2016 C O M M U N I Q U E In brotherly love, while with responsibility and hopes preparing for the participation in the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, which, God willing, is to be held at the Orthodox Academy at Crete around the Pentecost, from 17 until 26 June 2016, the Holy Synod of Bishops in its broader composition at its session held at the Serbian Patriarchate in Belgrade, on June 15, 2016, regarding the situation created after the ordinary...

June 15, 2016      As learned from a source in the Federal Security Service [FSB], a terrorist act was averted in the largest men’s monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church with several centuries of history—the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra. According to sources, on June 14 in several cafes in the Pushkin region of Podmoskovye were found homemade explosive devices and schemes and photos of the Lavra. “Makeshift explosive devices were found in three cafes” says the source. “One of them is located in the western part of the city of Pushkino. It belongs to an Azerbaijani and some Dagestanis. According to...

In a joint statement, Syriac patriarchs said 'the wound of forced emigration is still bleeding'Syriac patriarchs, marking the two-year anniversary since ISIS expelled Christians from a large part of Iraq, denounced “the ethno-religious genocide” of their people and called for the liberation of those areas. Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan and Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch in a joint statement, stressed that “the wound of forced emigration is still bleeding.” “Two years passed since the uprooting of our Syriac people from the land of our ancestors in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain,...

Pope Francis' annulment reform appears to require each diocese to have its own marriage tribunal, but many Italian bishops are defending their system of regional tribunals as both more efficient and less expensive, basically under the heading of, "If it's not broken, don't fix it."With a letter sent Wednesday to the general secretary of the Italian bishops’ conference, Pope Francis established a bilateral working group on the reform of the process of investigating marriage nullity. His June 8 letter to Bishop Nunzio Galantino, 67, the Bishop Emeritus of Cassano all’Jonio, stated that the working group is to be chaired by...

Centre-right leader Mauricio Macri gave 16,666,000 pesos to educational foundation backed by pope, reports sayThe frosty relationship between two of the world’s most prominent Argentinians appears to have taken a turn for the worse after it emerged that Pope Francis rejected a charitable donation from the government of President Mauricio Macri – at least partly – because the sum included the figure 666. Earlier this month, the centre-right president made a donation that totaled 16,666,000 pesos (slightly under $1.2m) from the Argentinian government to the Scholas Occurentes educational foundation, which is backed by the pope and is based on a...