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Pope Francis tore into priests who refuse to baptize the children of unwed mothers-- referring to them as "animals"-- during a June 16 meeting with participants in a Rome conference on the family. It is "pastoral cruelty" to refuse baptism, the Pope told the group, which was gathered at the basilica of St. John Lateran. In answer to a question about the message of his apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, the Pope said that the Church should avoid "rigorism" in responding to the pastoral needs of Catholics in irregular marital unions. "The Gospel chooses another way," he said: "welcoming, accompanying, integrating,...

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 “traditionalist” or “Fatimist” view of the post-conciliar “regime of novelty” in the Catholic Church has never been about grinding an axe; nor does it involve personalities, grudges or the other base motives that fuel polemics for polemics’ sake. If anything, the traditionalist approach to the current crisis in the Church has been essentially an elaborate and well-documented presentation of the obvious: that the trajectory on which the human element of the Church embarked in the name of Vatican II has been ever downward, leading to ever more bizarre and frightening outcomes. For decades the established Catholic commentariat, moving from...

Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a series examining Pope Francis’ papacy over the last three years. See part 1 here and part 2 here. June 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – It’s one of the most frequent talking points of Pope Francis. It’s definitely part of his appeal for the media and simultaneously one of the most hurtful things for those inside the Church for whom the faith means everything. I’m speaking of the Pope’s penchant for castigating faithful adherents of the Catholic faith as “obsessed,” “doctors of the law,” “neo-pelagian,” “self-absorbed,” “restorationist,” “fundamentalist,” “rigid,” “ideological,” “hypocritical,” and much more....

Prominent Catholic philosophers and a world expert on the Church Fathers have joined the growing chorus of voices expressing deep concerns over the implications of Pope Francis’s controversial exhortation Amoris Laetitia. “What was certain before has become problematic,” due to the pope’s signature ambiguity, wrote Dr. Jude P. Dougherty, the dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, in a column at The Wanderer. The seeming “internal waffling” going on inside the Church over the issue of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried is undermining the Church’s moral authority, Dougherty wrote, at a time...

Statement from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted and Auxiliary Bishop Eduardo A. Nevares Regarding the Orlando Mass Shootings PHOENIX — We join the Holy Father in encouraging the faithful to pray for the victims, families and first responders of those involved in the tragic events of the Orlando mass shootings.We express our profound condolences for the victims of this senseless act of terror, and support the statements made by Pope Francis, Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville and the President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Orlando Bishop John G. Noonan, shared below:A statement from Archbishop Joseph E....

On Tuesday, the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Valencia initiated criminal proceedings against the Archbishop of Valencia, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, who has been charged with inciting “hate crimes,” after the prelate spoke out in a homily against a reigning “gay empire,” criticized radical feminist groups, and decried Europe’s open-door policy toward migrants. “The family is haunted today, in our culture, by an endless threat of serious difficulties, and this is not hidden from anyone,” Cañizares said in his May 13 homily, pronounced on the eve of the International Day Against Lesbophobia, Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, at a Mass celebrated in the...

In Breitbart's report on this bizarre blogpost, author Thomas D. Williams notes: "In his post, the bishop made no attempt to explain how a 29-year-old Muslim who never stepped foot in a Catholic Church would have been motivated to carry out his deed by a supposed Catholic “contempt” for homosexuality." READ ARTICLE REMNANT COMMENT: Such reckless irresponsibility on the part of a Catholic bishop at a time like this is nothing short of dangerous. Bishop Bob Lynch should be forced to retire for trying to politicize this horrific tragedy even before the police and FBI have discovered the facts of...

Mistakes, gaffes, memory lapses, urban legends. A list of errors in the discourses of Francis. The most disastrous in Paraguay ROME, 13 June, 2016 – “As Benedict XVI said, the tolerance must be zero”: thus Pope Francis in his interview with “La Croix” of last May 16, concerning the sexual abuse of minors. But if one searches through all the writings and discourses of pope Joseph Ratzinger, the formula “zero tolerance” is simply not to be found. Nor is any equivalent formula. And yet it returns in the annals of the Vatican like a mantra, most recently a few days...

Last Friday, Steve Skojec reported on the eloquent and piercing response written by the German-speaking professor, Josef Seifert, as published by Professor de Mattei’s website Corrispondenza Romana. It seems that more and more conservative Catholics are taking heart and seeing it necessary to raise their own voices in opposition to the direction in which Pope Francis is now trying to take the Catholic Church. Now we have learned that another well-known U.S. philosopher and former dean of the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, Jude P. Dougherty, published a similar critique on 1 June in the Catholic...

The following paragraph is a citation from an email I received recently from a devout Catholic lady here in St. Louis who sometimes visits my church for Mass. She has given permission for this slightly edited version of her remarks to be made known to others who may be concerned about the grass-roots-level fallout from Amoris Laetitia. Her experience may well be symptomatic of situations that will now arise more and more frequently as the result of the Apostolic Exhortation’s tendentious guidelines for the pastoral “accompaniment” of divorced and remarried Catholics. >>I’m especially concerned about the turmoil Amoris Laetitia will...

What Christians Should Do in the Wake of Orlando (in response to what the Left says we must do). Time magazine was quick to employ a homosexual Christian — a contradiction in terms — to tell us "What Christians Must Do in the Wake of Orlando" (http://time.com/4366465/christians-after-orlando), and true to form, it was quick to blame Christians for causing "deep, lasting pain in LGBT people’s lives," even asserting that "Unless you’ve long been a vocal advocate for LGBT people, you’ve likely contributed to that suffering—intentionally or not." (In contrast "gay clubs" were described as providing "a unique place of refuge,...

"No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other." (St. Matthew 6: 24) *** (1) Either John Paul II and all the Popes who came before him are right, by emphasizing the "absoluteness" of the Church's moral law and by classifying as a "very serious error" that the doctrine of the Church is only an "ideal"... >>It would be a very serious error to conclude... that the Church's teaching is essentially only an "ideal" which must then be adapted, proportioned, graduated to...

GENEVA, Switzerland, June 10, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – Pope Francis’ representative to the United Nations told the World Health Assembly in Switzerland last month that the Holy See “welcomes” goal 3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), focused on ensuring “healthy lives,” and the goal’s 13 targets. However, the representative is coming under fire because one of the 13 targets included in his praise, specifically target 3.7, calls for “universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services.” The UN defined these terms at the 1994 Cairo conference to mean providing women with “modern contraception” for “family planning” and with “safe...

For more than three years now, Francis has been torturing Catholic ears and disturbing Catholic minds with an endless series of heterodox sermons and twisted “meditations” on Scripture, most of them delivered in the chapel of his digs in the five-star hotel at Casa Santa Marta. The daily spectacle has become almost comical: · Jesus only pretends to be angry with his disciples; · the child Jesus “probably had to beg forgiveness” from Mary and Joseph for his “little escapade” at the Temple; · Saint Paul declared “I boast only of my sins” (apparently confusing Saint Paul with Martin Luther);...

In a recent article for the Italian news platform “Corrispondenza Romana”, renowned Catholic philosopher Josef Seifert strongly criticizes Pope Francis for statements in his recent Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia. Seifert, a longtime ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy for Life and a close associate of St. John Paul II, explains that he criticizes the document because instead of invoking joy – as stated in the exhortation title – the papal document would actually make Jesus and his mother cry. Many of the passages which seem merciful turn the teachings of the Church on their heads, according to Seifert. “In my...

Unfortunately it took a scandalous retraction three years later to admit it as the study's authors originally reported that the results indicated that conservatives had psychotic personality traits and liberals had traits associated with high social desirability.  This much-touted research study in fact revealed just the opposite: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was...

After Cardinal Antonio Cañizares of Valencia said "we have legislation contrary to the family, the action of political and social forces, with added movements and actions of the gay empire," a coalition of pro-LGBT groups charged him with hate crimes under Spanish law.ROME- Criminal proceedings under hate speech laws have been initiated against a Spanish cardinal for his commentary on theories styling gender as a personal preference, in which he termed them “the most insidious ideology in the history of humanity,” and for his warnings against a “gay empire.” The Spanish Network of Help to Refugees has filed a complaint...

A scandal beyond compare took place on June 6 at TV2000, the television station of the Italian Bishops' Conference CEI. During the broadcast "Il diario di Papa Francesco" (The Diary of Pope Francis) a "Christian LGBT" appeared as a guest. The inappropriate label, which wants to suggest a reconciliation of Christianity and homosexuality, was used for the first time in early May in Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference. "The concept of choice is as incorrect as if the newspaper of the bishops were written by Christian abortionists'" said Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (NBQ). "The concept of choice...

60 Percent Think Gay Relationships Are OK, but Only 14 Percent Say Polygamy Is AlrightA large majority of Americans consider birth control and divorce "morally acceptable," according to the findings of a Gallup poll released this week. Gallup noted Wednesday that nearly nine in 10 Americans consider birth control usage to be morally acceptable and about seven in 10 found divorce to be morally acceptable. The two items were the top rated issues in a list of 19 different subjects that included gambling, the death penalty, pornography, polygamy, gay or lesbian relations, and abortion. With its 89 percent favorability rating,...