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ROME - The changes in canon law Pope Francis made to ensure that marriage annulment cases were handled more quickly, more pastorally and with less expense mean that some changes should be made in the way Church law is taught, said the Congregation for Catholic Education.The congregation published an instruction May 3 urging Catholic universities to strengthen their canon law programs and urging bishops to send more of their priests “and, if possible, laypeople” to Catholic universities to earn canon law degrees.The new rules, which go into effect for the 2019-2020 academic year, require all students in what is...

A group of priests has issued a plea to all the world’s bishops to “reaffirm Christ’s teaching” in the face of today’s “pastoral crisis” in the Catholic Church.  Fifteen American and European clergy, including Father Gerald Murray, a frequent guest on EWTN’s The World Over program, highlight a resurgence of “gravely harmful moral errors” regarding the feasibility of living Jesus’ teachings, the nature of conscience, and the role of the Church.  With measured and respectful words, A Pastoral Appeal to the Bishops for an Apostolic Reaffirmation of the Gospel expresses the hope that “much of the damage” caused by this trend “could be healed or mitigated” if...

God frees, ideas and ideologies do not: they make prisoners. From this axiom, clearly expressed in the Gospel of John and his reference to the doctors of the law, Pope Francis unfolds his homily during this morning mass in Casa Santa Marta before the C9 Cardinals, who until tomorrow will be attending their twenty-fourth meeting. Once again, the Pontiff warns against the risk of “rigidity”, which leads to placing oneself at the center and thus remain untouched before the works of the Holy Spirit and insensitive to new things.   The doctors of the law, in fact, were incapable of...

The Italian Catholic academician Massimo Borghesi has produced a book-length defense of Pope Francis entitled Jorge Mario Bergoglio: An Intellectual Biography.  As reported by National Catholic Register here, Borghesi argues that Francis is “an ‘original and profound’ thinker who has drawn on numerous Church thinkers of the 20th century to seek a ‘third position’ between conservatism and progressivism.”  According to Borghesi, Francis “has been influenced by thinkers who view the Church as ‘the complexio oppositorum, the point of contrasting unions that, on the natural level, do not find a solution.’”  He “‘is a mystic’ who sees his mission as resolving these...

Let us pick up here on a thought by Mundabor. In his post, No Rest for the Wicked, he writes; "Some FrancisShills have started to promote some sort of “truce” concerning the way this disgraceful Pontiff is treated by bloggers." I've seen these calls as well. No. not at all, no truce, no peace, no letting up on exposing the corruption of Jorge Bergoglio. There will be no relaxation on the reporting of the manipulation of his election, which may ultimately be invalidated and he declared an Antipope. No retreat on exposing his evil ideology of globalism, communism and Masonic...

Pope Francis's document Gaudete et Exsultate, which is supposed to be a call to holiness, has a lot of flowery religious Catholic language and even mentions prayer. This is why Dan Hitchens in First Things says of the document "there is an orthodox interpretation," but then writes: "But there is a different interpretation: that when someone says 'The Church teaches that X is intrinsically wrong,' he is probably a bit of a Pharisee. The history of Amoris Laetitia suggests that more expansive interpretation often gains the upper hand." (First Things, "An Ambiguous Exhortation," 4-12-18) Hitchens suggests that this papal document...

Lawler, Philip F. Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis Is Misleading His Flock. Washington, D.C. Regnery, 2018. xii + 203 pp. Available at Amazon.com. At times it appears difficult to keep up with Pope Francis. His words and his actions, both symbolic and sacramental, resemble the unpredictable trajectories of those steel balls on an old pinball machine — only there are no sides to make the ball stay in the playing field. Pope Francis has made it clear he doesn’t want to be pinned down. The Holy Father’s forays offer springboards of imagination to secular savants who welcome the collapse of...

The young Bergoglio is an assiduous reader of Fessard’s work La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de saint Ignace de Loyola. In it, the French Jesuit showed how Ignatian spirituality was determined by a polar tension between God and man, grace and freedom, the infinitely great and the infinitely small. From here rises the “tensioned thinking” of the future Pope. It is this thought that explains Bergoglio’s interest in the polar dialectic of Romano Guardini, when, in 1986, he went to Germany to do his doctoral thesis. Since then, Guardini has become his point of reference. This idea of polarity, which...

In May of last year, I posted a review of the Preparatory Document for the Synod of Bishops on “Young People, the Faith, and Vocational Discernment,” which is set to take place in October 2018.At that time, based on the bitter experiences of 2014-2015, we considered the likelihood that the “God of Surprises” and his merry band of modernists already have an outcome in mind and, come Hell or high water, they aim to achieve it.As for precisely what we can expect, it bore mention that even though the Preparatory Document didn’t give us much in the way of...

In an apparent move to rebut conservative allegations that the pope has been denying tenets of the Faith—a crisis that culminated during Holy Week with the pope’s alleged denial of hell and the immortality of the soul—Pope Francis on April 8 issued his newest Apostolic Exhortation “Gaudete et Exsultate“ (Rejoice and Be Glad), in which he bewails the “defamation and slander” being spread online by traditional Roman Catholic journalists and bloggers. In this newest document, the pope repeatedly mentions Satan, but seemingly with the implication that tradition-minded journalists and clergy who challenge his ideas are guided by the devil. He...

Yesterday afternoon, the Jorge Bergoglio Show was filmed before a live audience at San Paolo della Croce parish in Rome. The truly sickening spectacle that took place there (a portion of which can be viewed in the video clip below) called to my mind the following words taken from the 1971 hit song, American Pie:Oh and as I watched him on the stage My hands were clenched in fists of rage No angel born in Hell Could break that Satan’s spell And as the flames climbed high into the night To light the sacrificial rite I saw Satan laughing...

St. Augustine had views on marriage, sin, adultery,  and conscience directly contrary to those of Jorge Bergolgio as stated in his proclamation Amoris Laetitia (“AL” below). Passages quoted below from the works of St. Augustine, (henceforth “St. Augustine”) and Jorge Bergoglio (henceforth “Jorge”) show how widely the views of Jorge depart from, and in many instances contradict, Church teaching.   Can there be eternal condemnation ? Jorge:  “The way of the Church is not to condemn anyone for ever” (AL, 296).St. Augustine:  “The Death of the Wicked Shall Be Eternal in the Same Sense as the Life of the Saints.This...

DEERFIELD, IL, April 16, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Approximately 100 Catholics from the United States, Latin America, and Europe attended the 2018 Catholic Family News conference in northern Illinois last weekend. Advertised as “The Weapons of Our Warfare,” the three-day long gathering at a Hyatt Regency hotel just outside Chicago featured talks by some of the most knowledgeable laymen and clergy engaged in the battle for and preservation of the Catholic faith, including renowned Church historian Roberto de Mattei. The conference, which focused on Pope Francis and the family, was the first hosted by Catholic Family News, a Traditional Catholic newspaper,...

Catholic teaching prohibiting the use of contraception is unchangeable, Oklahoma City’s archbishop wrote in a recent article. Using contraception, such as the pill or the condom, to purposefully block the creation of a new life is “sinful,” he added.  Writing about the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), Archbishop Paul Coakley said in a March 28 article that contraception is harmful to both marriage and the individual person. “To separate these two [unitive and procreative purposes of the conjugal act] prevents the intimate expression of conjugal love from realizing its divinely intended purpose. To engage in sexual activity...

A single line in Cardinal Raymond Burke’s address at the recent "Catholic Church: Where are you going?" conference concerned the consequences of necessary disobedience to Pope Francis. Burke has already faced demotion at the hands of Pope Francis but many have wondered what he’d do if the penalty for his resistance to the Pope’s departure from Church teaching would be intensified to excommunication. LifeSiteNews asked Cardinal Burke if he has ever envisioned such consequences for himself as he has walked his path of resistance to the Pope’s direction on communion for divorced and "remarried" Catholics. In his talk at the April...

Pope Francis comforted a grieving child by telling him that his atheist father is in heaven.During a visit to Rome’s deprived Corviale district on Sunday, the Pope answered questions from a group of children. One of them, a boy called Emanuele, burst into tears when he met the Pope.After giving the child a long hug, Pope Francis asked him what was troubling him. Emanuele whispered in the Pope’s ear that his father, who was an atheist, had recently died and he was worried he could be in hell.Pope Francis asked Emanuele for permission to tell the crowd what he had...

When Popes Collide by Christopher A. Ferrara April 13, 2018 An astonishing aspect of the ecclesial crisis that Pope Francis has provoked with Amoris Laetitia (AL) is the diametric opposition of his program to the teaching of the very Pope he has canonized. Never before in the history of the Church has a Pope blatantly contradicted the teaching of one of his own predecessors on a matter of faith and morals. AL announces the utter novelty — and therefore, the utter falsity — of the moral teaching that the Sixth Commandment represents an “ideal” one cannot expect the divorced and...

Francis is “Happy When He Is Called a Revolutionary” Pope Francis is “happy when he is called a revolutionary” according to Cardinal Kasper gushing to the anti-Church Italian magazine Panorama (April 10) about Pope Francis. Kasper stresses that “between Jorge Mario Bergoglio and Joseph Ratzinger there is harmony, esteem, mutual affection.” The ultraliberal cardinal qualifies Francis’ actions which are loved by the commercial media as “prophetic”. But the prophets were never liked by the powerful and the majority. At the same time, Kasper stresses that those who criticize Francis are a “minority” and “few listen to them”. Kasper was all...

Should one take Cdl. Schönborn’s comments on female ordination seriously? April 11, 2018 Symptomatic of a society experiencing a breakdown of its order are, among other things, casual assertions by prestigious figures within that society that, if taken according to the plain meaning of their words, are deeply opposed to fundamental values within that society, but which, though uttered, raise nary an eyebrow among those charged with care for that society.Recent comments from Viennese prelate Christoph Cdl. Schönborn, apparently supportive of ordaining women, are opposed, I suggest, to at least three fundamental ecclesiological values but they have occasioned, as far I...

Gaudete et Exsultate is exactly what we have come to expect from this drearily predictable pontificate. To quote Carl Olsen in Catholic World Report: “many good qualities and substantive passages… often overshadowed, or even undermined, by straw men, dubious arguments, and cheap shots.”Bergoglian pronouncements in general are precisely vehicles for the delivery of straw men, dubious arguments and cheap shots, all invariably directed against orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Expressions of piety are wrapped around crass ecclesiastical demagoguery, a velvet glove for the clenched fist of militant humility so typical of the boorish cant of leftist Latin American clerics. The document’s call for...