Free Republic

An abortion advocacy organization called “Catholics for Choice” (CFC) placed deceptive full-page newspaper ads in multiple cities on September 12 calling for taxpayer funding of abortion in the name of the Catholic faith. As the U.S. Catholic bishops have stated for many years, the use of the name ‘Catholic’ as a platform to promote the taking of innocent human life is offensive not only to Catholics, but to all who expect honesty and forthrightness in public discourse. CFC is not affiliated with the Catholic Church in any way. It has no membership, and clearly does not speak for the faithful....

The Vatican issued a strong ruling about the sanctity of life this week when it said a man’s involvement in performing or helping someone procure an abortion is an obstacle to orientation as a Catholic priest. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the Vatican published the ruling on Thursday after Pope Francis approved the interpretation of church law during a Pontifical Council in May. The Catholic Church considers the sanctity of life “so absolute” that the new ruling even includes men who were not Catholic at the time of the abortion, according to the report. The Catholic Church is a...

September 16, 2016 (C-Fam) – Three powerful UN agencies are sponsoring the release of a document next week that calls for the Catholic Church to change her teachings on contraception, but also mentions that teachings on homosexuality, masturbation and in vitro fertilization should be changed as well. The document was prepared by dissident ex-priest John Wijngaards, who is based in the United Kingdom, and has been signed so far by more than 100 dissenting Catholic academics and a small number of non-Catholics. The document is being released in preparation for the 2018 50th anniversary of the Papal encyclical Humanae Vitae,...

Presidential Address of the Archbishop of Wales, the Most Rev Barry Morgan to he Governing Body meeting at the University of Trinity Saint David, Lampeter, on 14 Sept 2016I have to confess that over the last 13 years, I have never re-read a presidential address that I have given to this Governing Body. Good job too, some of you may be thinking, once is more than enough for anyone!! Before writing this one however, I decided to re-read the first one I ever gave as the new Archbishop and was amazed to discover that I had spoken about the authority...

September 16, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – The Catholic bishop of Cuernavaca, Mexico, is being investigated in response to his opposition to the gay agenda, according to national and local media sources, but he says if he goes to prison he’ll take advantage of the opportunity to bring the Gospel of Christ to the inmates there. Bishop Ramón Castro has been informed that he’s being investigated in response to a complaint by the socialist governor of the state of Morelos, Graco Ramírez, for speaking out against the creation of homosexual “marriage,” which was recently passed by the state legislature and signed into...

In 2015, when officials at Claflin University in South Carolina learned senior honors student Kamaria Downs was pregnant, they kicked her out of the dorms and told her to move off campus. "I was taken aback," the now 23-year-old elementary school teacher from Greenville told NBC News. "First, I wasn't even sure how they found out, and second, they were not offering me any type of housing." For Downs, who had pre-paid for her dorm room and meal plan, living at home more than two and a half hours away from her Orangeburg school wasn't an option. So she ended...

Intimately good In marriage, couples exchange a right to expect a reasonable recourse to sexual intimacy Msgr. Charles Pope September 18, 2016 9/7/2016 Question: If one spouse indicates an unwillingness to have any more children, would the other spouse be free to refuse all sexual intimacy? — Name Withheld, Wichita, Kansas Answer: You raise and link two issues that must first be treated separately. In the second matter, refusing all marital intimacy, except for a grave cause, is a violation of the rights of one’s spouse. When a man and a woman marry, they exchange, among other goods, what Canon...

Dr. Jeffrey Mirus on marriage and the Eucharist Dr. Jeffrey Mirus has recently published an article entitled ‘Not heretical: Pope Francis’ approval of the Argentine bishops’ policy on invalid marriages’*. The object of this article is to argue that Pope Francis has not asserted or endorsed heresy in approving of a recent document issued by some Argentinian bishops concerning the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia. To justify this conclusion, Dr. Mirus makes a number of claims about moral behaviour and the discipline of the sacraments. These claims urgently need to be addressed. This discussion of Mirus’s assertions will not consider the...

EDMONTON, Alberta, September 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The Catholic Church has not changed her practice towards divorced and civilly remarried Catholics — despite what the faithful may have been led to believe through the media or other sources, the Alberta and Northwest Territory bishops stated in pastoral guidelines released Wednesday. It is “erroneous” to conclude that divorced and civilly remarried Catholics can receive Holy Communion “if they simply have a conversation with a priest,” stated the guidelines, signed by the six bishops responsible for over 1,000,000 Catholics in five dioceses. The 10-page document is intended to “answer the call of...

With the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae approaching in 2018, dozens of 1960s-era dissenting theologians have dusted off their Rules for Radicals handbooks and launched what hopefully will be a final senseless ploy to challenge the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception. On September 20 at the United Nations, dissidents will release a statement signed by 135 scholars, including more than two dozen Catholic theologians and other professors at U.S. Catholic colleges. Among the signers are the infamous Father Charles Curran, who was ousted from The Catholic University of America by the Vatican in 1986 and now teaches at Southern Methodist...

Sexual progressives claim to be ushering in a “brave new world” of freedom. But their “new” morality is as old as the hills. How often have you heard sexual progressives claim that those of us who hold to traditional sexual morality and marriage are “on the wrong side of history?” But as one new book points out, it’s the proponents of the sexual revolution who are embracing a sexual morality that history left behind millennia ago—in the dusty ruins of the Roman Forum. Yes, today Western civilization is undergoing a dramatic cultural shift. In just a few short years our...

Information, disinformation, truths, half-truths and lies all seem to be jumbled up in the communication strategy of the Holy See. The history of the Church is being written through interviews, improvised discourses, articles on semi-official blogs and media-rumours, leaving the field wide open to all interpretations possible and giving rise to the suspicion that the confusion is deliberate. Two recent examples. The first regards the expulsion of the President of the IOR (the Vatican Bank), Ettore Gotti Tedeschi in 2012. In Benedict XVI’s latest book “Last Conversations” with Peter Seewald, the “Pope Emeritus” takes responsibility himself for Gotti Tedeschi’s dismissal,...

So now we know. We knew before, really, but didn’t have explicit confirmation. The long, agonizing slog, however, is finally over: from Pope Francis’ invitation to Cardinal Kasper to address the bishops in Rome in February of 2014 to the pope’s letter last week to some Argentinean bishops affirming guidelines they had developed in a joint document that, in “exceptional cases,” people divorced and remarried (living in an “adulterous” relationship as we believed for 2000 years in Western Christianity), may receive Holy Communion. This whole affair is bizarre. No other word will do. As I wrote on this page many...

The archdiocese is refusing to disclose reason behind sudden removalPARAMUS, N.J. (ChurchMilitant.com) - Two administrators at a Catholic high school currently engaged in a legal battle with a lesbian teacher have been ousted without explanation. According to the archdiocese of Newark Tuesday, Pres. James P. Vail and Principal Stephanie Macaluso "are on leave from their posts" at Paramus Catholic High School effective immediately. The reasons, archdiocesan spokesman James Goodness stated, are personal, and further details would not be given. Paramus Catholic High School in northeastern New Jersey is presently fighting a lawsuit filed by Kate Drumgoole, an open lesbian fired...

The first English translation of the Pope's announcement on harmonising Eastern and Western canon law. Translated by Fr James Bradley and Ed Condon APOSTOLIC LETTER GIVEN MOTU PROPRIO OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF FRANCIS BY WHICH ARE CHANGED VARIOUS NORMS OF THE CODE OF CANON LAW Moved by Our constant solicitude for the concordance between the two Codes We became aware of some points not in perfect harmony between the rules of the Code of Canon Law and those of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. The two codes have, on the one hand, common standards, and on the...

Lamentations 1:12: O all ye that pass by the way, attend, and see if there be any sorrow like to my sorrow. Devotion to the sorrows of Our Lady was fostered during the Middle Ages by the Fathers of the Servite Order. It was these good priests who first enumerated the Seven Dolours of Our Lady. Pope Pius VII extended the celebration of this feast to the Universal Church in 1817, in order to recall the sufferings which the Church had undergone in the troubled period following the French Revolution. Of course, the forces working through and beyond that revolutionary...

It seems that not a week goes by without some twisting of Sacred Scripture by a Pope who, as the past three-and-a-half years have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, has the singular distinction among all his predecessors of being nothing short of a font of error. This unparalleled development has prompted the emergence of a group of diocesan priests who have compiled a vast assortment of Francis’s errors under the title Denzinger-Bergoglio, declaring as their motivation “We all have responsibility for the Church of the Lord.” Indeed we do. Which is why this newspaper is obliged to follow the example...

The pro-abortion group Catholics for Choice placed "Abortion in Good Faith" full-page ads in several newspapers around the country on Monday urging the repeal of the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment prohibits taxpayer funding of abortion. Today, we launched a campaign to show that Catholics support abortion funding #InGoodFaith. Join us. https://t.co/rsmlSxOBDO— Catholics for Choice (@Catholic4Choice) September 12, 2016 On Wednesday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the chairman of the USCCB's Committee on Pro-Life Activities, issued a statement condemning the group. Cardinal Dolan said that the use of the name "Catholic" to promote abortion is offensive and that they are in no way...

Information, disinformation, truths, half-truths and lies all seem to be jumbled up in the communication strategy of the Holy See. The history of the Church is being written through interviews, improvised discourses, articles on semi-official blogs and media-rumours, leaving the field wide open to all interpretations possible and giving rise to the suspicion that the confusion is deliberate. Two recent examples. The first regards the expulsion of the President of the IOR (the Vatican Bank), Ettore Gotti Tedeschi in 2012. In Benedict XVI’s latest book “Last Conversations” with Peter Seewald, the “Pope Emeritus” takes responsibility himself for Gotti Tedeschi’s dismissal,...

From the very beginning of this ill-fated pontificate, this page was maligned for stating the obvious about Cardinal Bergoglio, and the prospects his positions brought to the papacy. For example, from the very beginning it was clear to us Francis wanted to impose on the Church the new doctrine of communion to the "divorced and remarried" (that is, those living in permanent state of sin, without the desire to end their sinful situation), the new German Doctrine. Other commentators tried to hide for as long as possible, even up to a few days ago, that the Pope wanted to personally...