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Mosul (Agenzia Fides) - Mr. Ryan Salem who yesterday appeared in a television program to assert that Iraqi Christians are also present in Mosul to fight and take revenge on Sunni Muslims, "has nothing to do with the Christ’s moral teachings, messenger of peace, love and forgiveness", and cannot "make such statements involving Christians", as it "does not represent them in any way". This is what the Chaldean Patriarchate released yesterday evening, a real formal notice, just after national television network had aired the reckless statements made by Ryan Salem, a Chaldean Christian from Alqosh, linked to paramilitary groups of...

The Rt Rev. Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury, insists that the pastoral accompaniment of couples in painful situations must "never compromise our faith in the marriage bond." Bishop Davies defended the indissolubility of marriage during a homily he delivered at the annual  Diocesan Celebration of Marriage. Referring to Our Lady of Lourdes, Bishop Davies also stressed the necessity of penance in the context of the Holy Eucharist: Pope Francis reminds us that, amid the present crisis of the family, the Church never abandons any soul. She ardently desires to accompany and bring healing to everyone in every situation,...

Only twenty-four days since the inauguration of the new president and Christians have plenty of reasons to be thankful for Donald Trump. The President, Vice President and the Republican party are keeping their campaign promises to Catholics and evangelical Christians about pro-life issues, gender ideology, and Obamacare.  Here are just some of the reasons why Christians can be thankful for President Trump and his administration: U.S. House of Representatives votes to overturn Obama regulation forcing states to fund Planned Parenthood Faced with an increasing number of states passing laws to defund the industrial-scale abortion providers Planned Parenthood, ex-President Obama...

SSPX regularization, priests refusing Communion in the hand, heretic Martin Luther, and Amoris Laetitia discussed. Today, along with our Spanish-language partners "Adelante la Fe," we release a video interview with His Excellency Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Saint Mary in Astana. The interview, conducted by Mauricio Ponce, goes into many of the hot-button issues facing the Church today. Please see the video below. And, as always, we ask everyone to post this on their blogs and social media sites. On Rorate Caeli's site On YouTube

In April 2016, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth, England, issued a pastoral letter on the interpretation of Amoris Laetitia (the Pope’s apostolic exhortation on marriage) and re-affirmed the Church’s long-settled teaching: The divorced and civilly remarried, while members of the Christian community, are not living in full communion with that community, and thus should not present themselves for Holy Communion until their manner of life changes or their irregular marriage has been regularized under Church law. Last month, Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Bishop Mario Grech of Malta also issued a pastoral letter on Amoris Laetitia and invited divorced and...

We Must Not Forget the Sacramental Nature of the Church “Is the pope Catholic?” used to be an answer, not a question. Alas, it has become a question; or rather it has become five questions, in the form of the dubia put to Pope Francis by four of his cardinals. In good Jesuit fashion, Francis seems to be making his reply by other means—since responding directly to dubia is apparently distasteful, as even the Prefect of the Holy Office Gerhard Cardinal Müller has now said. Thus far, the replies (comments about pharisaical doctors of the law, and that sort of...

In an interview with an Austrian newspaper, the acting head of the Order of Malta has described being present at the meeting where the Grand Chancellor was asked to resign -- and that it was American Cardinal Raymond Burke, not the Grand Master, who made the request. The Knights of Malta’s chaplain, the pope’s arch-critic American Cardinal Raymond Burke, not its Grand Master, was the one who asked the order’s Grand Chancellor to resign, according to the Knights’ acting head.Ludwing Hoffmann von Rumerstein, who is Austrian, was present at a meeting on December 6 in which the Grand Chancellor, Albrecht Von Boeselager, was...

The protestors believe that animals have souls and should be let into churchesAnimal rights activists in Italy have stormed a Mass demanding that their dogs be treated as Christians. The Times reported that police were called to Santa Maria della Cima in Genzano to deal with a group of 20 protestors who were waving banners and carrying their pets while calling for animals to be allowed into church because they have souls. The church was targeted by Animalisti Italiani after Roxana Grasso, 47, was told she would not be allowed to bring her Pomeranian to prayers. “I believe that animals...

VATICAN CITY Pope Francis appeared on Wednesday to back Native Americans seeking to halt part of the Dakota Access Pipeline, saying indigenous cultures have a right to defend "their ancestral relationship to the earth".The Latin American pope, who has often strongly defended indigenous rights since his election in 2013, made his comments on protection of native lands to representative of tribes attending the Indigenous Peoples Forum in Rome.While he did not name the pipeline, he used strong and clear language applicable to the conflict, saying development had to be reconciled with "the protection of the particular characteristics of indigenous peoples...

An undocumented immigrant is taking refuge at a church in Denver while she fights to remain in the country. Jeanette Vizguerra, a mother of four, was scheduled to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Wednesday morning. She wanted to extend the stay on her deportation order, which expired last week, while she applies for a special visa. It was denied. She now faces separation from her American-born children, the youngest of whom is just 6. Vizguerra’s attorney appeared in court for her, saying she probably would have been taken into custody if she appeared. She is now taking...

Yesterday, we told you about the new book from Cardinal Coccopalmerio, entitled, The Eighth Chapter of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Today was the Vatican press conference for the release of the book, but the author didn’t come. 1P5 contributor Oakes Spalding comments: 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 line with traditional...

The Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church and Society and Media Vlaidmir Legoida has stated that the steps taken in the US to ban funding of abortions from the state budget are welcomed by the Moscow Patriarchate, and resonate with its own initiative to remove abortion from Russia’s obligatory medical insurance. The US House of Representatives passed a bill in late January that forbids allocating budget funds for abortion and the granting of tax creds to employers who buy their employees insurance that includes abortion. Additionally, on January 23, President Trump signed an executive order abolishing the financing of...

Steve Bannon in his natural plumage: no Magna Cappa Everyone loves a conspiracy theory, and of late English-language media have been giddy with speculation that Trump mastermind Steve Bannon and American Cardinal Raymond Burke, seen as a leading traditionalist critic of Pope Francis, have formed a pact to “legitimize extremist forces that want to bring down Western liberal democracy,” in the words of the Washington Post. (What the specific aim of this alliance may be isn’t terribly clear, since nobody seriously believes a Trump-backed Vatican palace coup is in the offing. Presumably, the idea is to encourage and embolden...

Kremlinology was supposed to have gone out with the end of the Cold War, but the murky connections between the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin may be bringing it back into fashion. Vaticanology, on the other hand, never went away, and with reports on the links between Stephen Bannon, Cardinal Raymond Burke, and conservative elements in Rome, it seems a more vibrant area of study every day. Just consider how the most influential papers in the United States have taken up the topic of Bannon and Burke lately, with the New York Times featuring multiple stories and the Washington...

President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving ideological force behind his “America First” agenda is a Catholic whose Islamophobia and reactionary nationalism have found an audience among a band of aggrieved church leaders openly hostile to Pope Francis. In a deep-dive report from Rome, the New York Times chronicles how Steve Bannon has skillfully networked with Cardinal Raymond Burke and other Vatican operators to push his dark vision of right-wing populism: When Stephen K. Bannon was still heading Breitbart News, he went to the Vatican to cover the canonization of John Paul II and make some friends. High...

Yesterday, I posted HERE about the release of the booklet by Card. Coccopalmerio, Prefect of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. It was ballyhooed as The Response™ to the Five Dubia of the Four “intransigent” Cardinals, who are dissenters because they are defending doctrine. The Cardinal’s booklet, which had a veneer of official approval because it was published by the Vatican Press, was to be publicly presented today.Yesterday I made two main points.First, the booklet cannot by any reasonable person be thought to be The Response™ to the Five Dubia of the Four Cardinals. The Response™ must come from His Holiness...

Evelyn Waugh’s character Charles Ryder described his friend Sebastian’s protracted acts of self-destruction as “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne” (Brideshead Revisited, 1945) . I thought of Waugh’s words as I read, in the wake of the Maltese Disaster and the German bishops’ slightly more nuanced program to the same effect, some excerpts translated from Francesco Cdl. Coccopalmerio’s new, short book on Pope Francis’ Amoris laetitia.If the excerpts I read are accurate, the President of the Pontifical...

In spite of the original date, this was an excerpt on The Aquila Report today, assuming because it is about to be released as a movie. _______________________________________________ The publishing world sees very few books reach blockbuster status, but William Paul Young’s The Shack has now exceeded even that. The book, originally self-published by Young and two friends, has now sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into over thirty languages. It is now one of the best-selling paperback books of all time, and its readers are enthusiastic. According to Young, the book was originally written for his...

A recent guest lecture at Swarthmore College by a prominent homosexual seminary professor highlighted a growing argument among the so-called queer community that Jesus was bisexual. In particular, the Rev. Patrick Cheng, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, told the students that Jesus was a subversive person and God’s way of “queering the world,” so to speak. Cheng said Christ was “always coming out in the gospels” and that “Christ is God coming out.” “At its heart, Christianity is queer,” Cheng told the students during the Feb. 7 talk. “It’s not just a matter of being tolerant....

'We hope that President Trump and his administration will take action soon,' said Baltimore Archbishop William Lori. Talk of President Donald Trump possibly signing an executive order on religious freedom — which drew both criticism and praise — has been replaced with discussion about what happened to it and what a final version, if there is one, will look like.A draft version of the executive order, called Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom, had been widely criticised in late January by those who said it would legalise discrimination and was too far-reaching. It then failed to appear on...