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Five pictures featuring same-sex couples have been removed from a reissued booklet sent to Catholic parishes in preparation for the visit to Ireland next august of Pope Francis for a World Meeting of Families event. The text of the publication has also been edited. A line in the original booklet has now been removed. That line stated: “While the Church upholds the ideal of marriage as a permanent commitment between a man and a woman, other unions exist which provide mutual support to the couple. Pope Francis encourages us never to exclude but to accompany these couples also, with love,...

In a stunning move of the utmost importance, the Vatican today announced that Pope Francis has decided to send Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta to Chile to listen to the victims that accuse Bishop Juan Barros of being present when they were abused by the country’s most notorious predator, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, and of covering this up.The Vatican statement, issued in Italian and Spanish, said: As a result of some information received recently regarding the case of Monsignor Juan de La Cruz Barros Madrid, Bishop of Osorno (Chile), the Holy Father has decided that Msgr. Charles Scicluna, the archbishop...

James Martin, S.J. has had a conference cancelled at a parish. It has been moved to a private venue. Below the picture below of a recent Tweet, is his comment on the matter on his Facebook page. He refers to those who oppose his dissent from the faith being promoted in our parishes as "hate mongers and bullies."  Full disclosure: I do not hate anyone suffering from same-sex attraction. I have three friends, all who formerly engaged in same-sex behaviour and have all overcome it. One is married to a woman. The other two are celibate and chaste faithful men....

A Catholic diocese in New Jersey is canceling a talk offered by Fr. James Martin, S.J., best known for his attempts to normalize homosexuality. The celebrity Jesuit had been scheduled to offer a Lenten reflection on February 15, at Our Lady of Lourdes parish in the diocese of Metuchen. The diocese announced Martin's speaking engagement this month in its newspaper, The Catholic Spirit. The communications director for the diocese of Metuchen, Erin Friedlander, confirmed with Church Militant on Friday that the parish "is no longer hosting the planned talk." According to the inside source, the invitation had originated in the...

This month has been quite a spectacle, even for this pontificate; an apparently unending stream of outrages and embarrassments, with the pope and his Vatican media support jumping from one scandal to the next. But among secular reporters the sex abuse issue trumps all others and the fallout continues to blaze down on the Bergoglian pontificate in response to his amazing accusation earlier this month that victims of sexual abuse by clergy were engaging in “calumny,” in their accusations against a Chilean bishop, Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid.The incident was brief: on the Thursday of the pope’s week-long South...

Change the Catechism. If its doctrine does not coincide with the new desired orthodoxy concerning homosexuality, it will be better to adopt the solution of Alexander the Great, who with one stroke of his sword decided to untangle the Gordian knot in his own way: by cutting it in two.In the same way, in order to accept and definitively clear the way for homo-erotic practice, it is necessary to address the fundamentals, and from there everything will be easier. Now that an attitude of laxity and acceptance of homosexuality as a natural variant of human sexuality is becoming increasingly common,...

A high-ranking priest of the Diocese of Limburg now proposes to establish a special blessing for couples who are either “remarried” or homosexual. The diocese has been working on this project for some years, but the initiative has now gained new energy. As the official website of the German bishops, Katholisch.de, reported, the Dean of the Catholic Church in Frankfurt, Johannes zu Eltz, on January 20 made the proposal of having a “theologically justified blessing” for those couples who are either homosexual, “remarried,” or who for other reasons do not feel “sufficiently worthy” for the Sacrament of Matrimony. At the...

The Diocese of Poitiers, France has published a pro-LGBT article in the latest issue of its diocesan journal. The article, entitled “Parents of Children who are ‘Different’, Homosexual” was written by “parents of homosexual children.” They write: We are trying to love our children, by not judging them, by trying to understand them and accept them as they are. Thanks to them, we have changed our attitude. They have taught us tolerance {of what? of sin?}, how to come out of our conformism, to be in the truth. They have opened us to the Spirit of the Word of Christ,...

The government in Ireland is mounting pressure on Catholic counselors to serve gay couples or else lose funding of client services.  On Monday, the U.K. daily newspaper The Times reported that Catholic marriage counselors could be closed for "discriminating" against same-sex couples unless they change their policy refusing to serve LGBT individuals on religious grounds.   Fintan Warfield, Sinn Féin senator, supported the measure, saying, "It is wrong for public monies to be channelled at organizations who fail to serve all sections of our society."  "Why would the state identify an organization and task them with resolving relationship difficulties when that organization fails to embrace the...

The papal plane stunt provided a great smoke-screen from the Pope awarding a extremist lgbt / pro-abortion politician a Knighthood in the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great (although this was pretty well hidden among a plethora of awful ecclesial developments over the last week as I noted in this post). But there was another, much bigger issue which this PR stunt was perhaps designed to cover up, as Robert Mickens (not the most traddy journalist on the planet) points out in this La Croix article:

The chairman of the Vatican’s commission on sexual abuse has said that recent comments from Pope Francis were painful and alienating to survivors of clerical sexual abuse. "It is understandable that Pope Francis’ statements yesterday in Santiago, Chile were a source of great pain for survivors of sexual abuse by clergy or any other perpetrator,” said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, in a Jan. 20 statement.  The statement refers to a comment made by Pope Francis to a Chilean reporter Jan. 18. The Pope was asked about Bishop Juan Barros, a Chilean accused by four victims of clerical sexual...

Since the beginning of this year, there seems to be an intensification of progressivist activity within the Catholic Church in Germany in order to liberalize the Church’s teaching on, and assessment of, homosexuality. As if a dam has broken, one initiative rapidly follows another. It seems as if Germany might become the guiding country with regard to this issue, just as the Amazon region might become the leader of reform with regard to married priests, in the sense of a “decentralized Church” as recently outlined by the progressivist theologian Father Paul Zulehner. The near future will tell us more. Let...

In the bad old days, when Catholic parents reported that a priest had abused their child, and/or that the pastor was aware of the abuse, the bishop might scold them, saying that their complaints were nonsense, saying that they had no proof, accusing them of calumny. The bishop might make these harsh statements, in the bad old days, even if he was fully aware of charges against the priest—even if he had encouraged the pastor to resign because of his mishandling of the situation. These are the bad old days. But in the bad old days the faithful parents still...

In stunning new comments made during his visit to South America this week, Pope Francis has attacked the credibility of victims of notorious clerical sexual abuser Fr. Fernando Karadima. The pope accused abuse victims of “calumny” for their allegations that Bishop Juan Barros, a Karadima protege, knew about the abuse, or even that he watched as it took place. “There is not one shred of proof against him.” Francis said to a Chilean journalist at the end of his visit to Chile. “It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”On Twitter, Barros’ “most vocal accuser”, Juan Carlos Cruz, lashed out about the...

Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander Thursday, an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country. Francis said that until he sees proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the sex crimes of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, such accusations against Barros are “all calumny.”

SANTIAGO, Chile - In his first public address in Chile, Pope Francis apologized for the “irreparable damage” caused by clerical sexual abuse. In the wake of what he had to say, abuse survivor Peter Saunders, a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, wasn’t impressed.“The pope spoke today about shame, but that isn’t good enough,” Saunders told Crux on the phone. “He could have removed [Bishop Juan] Barros a long time ago, and that would have been a good symbolic move to make. Symbols are as good as words.”RELATED: Pope opens Chile trip with apology for clerical...

The archbishop of Westminster is promoting a group opposing Church teaching on homosexuality. Cardinal Vincent Nichols is reinstating the status of Quest — a group that was removed from the Catholic Directory by his predecessor Cdl. Basil Hume — in the archdiocese of Westminster. Free clip from CHURCH MILITANT Premium WATCH MORE LIKE THIS   Quest, a self-proclaimed LGBT Catholic advocacy group, had been in the directory since 1992. Despite the fact Hume was an LGBT advocate, he had it removed because of its open opposition to Church teaching. Quest claims, "In the past, the language used by the Church...

The New York Times notes that on the very day when he apologized to Chileans for the Church’s handling of the sex-abuse scandal, Pope Francis concelebrated Mass with Bishop Juan Barros Madrid, who was named by the Pope to head the Osorno diocese despite complaints about his long friendship with a notorious abuser. In fact, last week the Associated Press revealed that Bishop Barros had actually offered his resignation because of the scandal. But the Pope did not accept that resignation. Instead he promoted the embattled bishop, and announced that his critics in Chile were “carried away by the...

In a January 16, 2018 “Commentary” for “The National Catholic Reporter,” Creighton University Professor Todd A. Salzman, chair of the Department of Theology at Creighton, and Michael G. Lawler, professor emeritus, disagreed with the decision by certain US Bishops to possibly deny a Catholic funeral for someone who died while in a same-sex “married” relationship. They single out Bishop Thomas Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield for specific criticism. From of a “Decree” issued by Paprocki, Salzman and Lawler are especially troubled with the following directive: Unless they have given some signs of repentance before their death, deceased persons who...

Fr. Gerald Murray, a regular commentator on EWTN’s news program The World Over, told show host Raymond Arroyo in a recent interview that the infamous chapter 8 of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia is in “error,” and that he hopes it will be “withdrawn” by the pope.  Murray, a canon lawyer, also condemned the interpretation of Amoris laetitia published by the Argentinean bishops of the Pastoral Region of Buenos Aires last year, and recently republished by the Pope himself in the official Acts of the Apostolic See, calling it an “overthrow of the moral order” and calling for its...