Free Republic

During Holy Thursday Mass, Pope Francis washed the feet of migrants, three of whom were Muslims. Most Catholics understood this as a gesture of humility and brotherhood. That is how the Catholic press reported it—and that, undoubtedly, was the Pope’s intention. Many Muslims, however, may see it differently—not as a gesture of brotherhood, but as one of submission and surrender. The word “Islam” means “submission,” and submission is what Islam expects of other faiths. Muslims consider Islam to be the supreme religion. To the extent that it tolerates the “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews), Islam tolerates them on...

Image from telesurtv.netPope Francis has been a grave disappointment to many Christians, not just Catholics. He appears to be as steeped in “Merchant of Death” conspiracy theory as he is in Christian theology. At a traditional pre-Easter ritual, the Pope washed the feet of refuges, including a Catholic woman, Muslims, and a Hindu man. The ritual had long been limited to practising Catholic men, almost exclusively, priests. Many Catholics are unhappy with this severe break in tradition.Of greater interest is that the Pope blames the terrorist attack in Brussels on arms manufacturers and arms traffickers.  From telesurtv.net: “Three days ago,...

March 22, 2016, Tuesday — The NuncioA Man of the ChurchAbout half a decade ago, at an event in Rome, I ran into an American woman I hadn’t seen for more than 20 years, since the time we were both students working on dissertations in the manuscript room of the Vatican Library.To my surprise, she was working in a Vatican office. I had thought she had returned to America to be a professor in a university.We got to talking about this and that, and the subject of “Vatileaks 1” came up. I asked her what she thought about some of...

Prefect of the Pontifical Household says the Pope has awoken expectations regarding Church reform but not yet clear how these will all be played out.Archbishop George Ganswein has sought to reassure the faithful that Pope Francis will adhere to the Church's teaching on Holy Communion and civilly remarried divorcees. In an interview over the weekend with Deutsche Welle, the prefect of the Pontifical Household, who is also Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's private secretary, said it is "not the first time" that a pope has tried to tackle this question, but that he was "convinced" that Francis "will continue on the...

BERWICK, Pa. — State police say a 78-year-old nun was caught shoplifting $23 worth of coffee, snacks and toiletries from a store in central Pennsylvania. Troopers say Sister Agnes Pennino was seen shoplifting the items from the Surplus Outlet near Berwick on Monday afternoon. WNEP-TV reports police determined the woman captured on surveillance video was the nun who lived about 20 miles away at the Saints Cyril and Methodius Convent in Danville. Store manager Zane Kishbach says he "couldn't believe it that a nun would actually do something like that."

A new document has been distributed in the Roman Rota regarding the recent reform of matrimonial processes. It is entitled “Sussidio applicativo del Motu proprio Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus”- a subsidy for the application of the Motu Proprio recently released. This manual attempts to explain — with two introductions, 30 items and 4 appendixes — how to put the reform of the 21 canons of the Canon Law into practice, as employed by the motu proprio “Mitis Iudex” – when the document already contained 21 explicatory articles regarding the manner of applying the alterations. Now we have more on the...

March 16, 2016 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- On March 16, speaking publicly on a rare occasion, Pope Benedict XVI gave an interview to Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian Bishops' Conference, in which he spoke of a “two-sided deep crisis” the Church is facing in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The report has already hit Germany courtesy of Vaticanist Guiseppe Nardi, of the German Catholic news website Katholisches.info. Pope Benedict reminds us of the formerly indispensable Catholic conviction of the possibility of the loss of eternal salvation, or that people go to hell: The missionaries of the 16th...

The Inclination to the Truth Msgr. Charles Pope • March 14, 2016 • In a recent post (Is There a Way Back to Undeniable Reality and Universally Binding Norms?) I discussed how we today tend to “live in our heads” a lot more so than did the people living in biblical times and even those who lived up to and including the High Middle Ages and the Scholastic Period. Prior to that time, the “real world” was taken to be largely self-evident. But in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a school of thought later called “nominalism” began...

ROME, March 14, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - In a recent interview, Cardinal Gerhard Muller, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), acknowledged that he must sometimes correct Pope Francis on matters of dogma, noting that the pope is not a "professional theologian." In a March 1 interview with the German newspaper Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, Cardinal Muller was asked about his relationship with the pope and whether he is his strongest opponent. Muller first explains that he had been appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. Concerning Benedict, he adds: "With him, I was closely connected due to the fact...

In a powerful symbolic gesture that is sure to resonate across the globe from Europe to the United States and Australia, Pope Francis will wash the feet of 12 refugees on Holy Thursday in Rome. He will do so on March 24, at a center that assists migrants in the city. The Vatican has not yet disclosed the venue. The breaking news comes at a time when many politicians in Europe, the United States and elsewhere are calling for the closing of the doors of their countries to refugees and migrants. Several governments in Europe, including Austria, Poland, Hungary and...

That sincere dialogue among men and women of different faiths may produce the fruits of peace and justice...

Not long ago, Francis' niece, Cristina Bergoglio, said that she sees "...the church as outdated," and added, "that's why I believe life has put my uncle to renew this certain system of thought that was getting stagnated." That "certain system of thought" is Roman Catholicism. As Randy Engel has said, "Catholicism is a religion of Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Magisterium, the fullness of the Faith, handed down to us from the time of the Apostles. It never was, is, or will be a religion of 'evolution' or 'change' related to dogmatic truths and morals. Yet, Francis continues to maintain...

That the Mexican Bishops were not pleased with Pope Francis’ discourse of February 13th, had been understood immediately. Even so, three weeks later the discontent has now exploded in “Desde la Fe”, the Archdiocese of Mexico City’s magazine, and simultaneously on the Archdiocese’s official site, in an unsigned editorial [in Spanish here], thus traceable to the Archbishop himself, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera. It was one passage in particular that humiliated the bishops in the Pope’s discourse, when Francis stopped reading the written text and said: “The mission is vast and it requires many ways to conduct it. And it is...

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's main archdiocese has taken the unusual step of publicly saying Pope Francis had been badly advised when directed harsh words to local bishops during his visit in mid-February. The pope told a gathering of local bishops in February not to be career-minded clerics, saying, "We do not need 'princes,' but rather a community of the Lord's witnesses." The pope also urged them to maintain unity and show more transparency. "If you have to fight, fight. If you have to say things, say them, but do it like men: to the face," Francis told the bishops....

Pope Francis described the influx of migrants into Europe as an 'Arab invasion' before explaining that the new arrivals will enhance Europe for the better. The pontiff was giving a speech to an audience of French Christians when he reflected on Europe's history of migration and the positive impact it has had on its culture today.

Little children it is the last hour: just as you have heard, Antichrist is come, and even now many Antichrists have come to be, by which we know that it is the last hour. 1 John 2:18 Thus sinning against your brothers, and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. 1 Corinthians 8:10 Since Christ made it clear (Matthew 24:36) that even he does not know the day and hour when heaven and earth will pass away, I have never wasted much time on people who think they have figured it out. Yet Christ also made...

The Pope and the Baby Killer In 2010, after I had lived in Italy about two years and had begun to understand the byzantine complexities of this country's politics, Emma Bonino decided to run for the office of governor of the region of Lazio. Once I found out what kind of person she was, I was seized with the urge to buy a crate of spray paint and go around Rome writing, "10,000 bambini assassinati non abbastanza per Emma 'la Bicicletta' Bonino," on all her posters. "10,000 murdered babies not enough for Emma 'the bicycle' Bonino." I thought of it...

It appears that a children's book titled Dear Pope Francis is to be released on March 1. Rorate Caeli obtained and posted a section of the book that is not only disturbing, but provides a snapshot into the mind of Francis concerning the ancient Mass of the Church. This is the excerpt: "Dear Pope Francis, Were you ever near the pries as the altar boy? Greetings from Alessio (Italy, age 9)" "Dear Alessio, yes, I was an altar boy. And you? What part among the altar boys do you have? It's easier to do now, you know: You might know...

Think about the logical implications of the Pope's criticism of a proposed wall on our border with Mexico. By calling such a barrier "un-Christian," the Pope is saying that it's the duty of Christians to suffer the disease, drugs, poverty and crime illegal immigrants bring in their wake. He's saying Americans have no right to protect our national identity from intruders unwilling to assimilate. He's saying that forcing the working poor to compete for jobs with cheap immigrant labor is the Christian thing to do. And he's saying U.S. taxpayers have a moral obligation to foot the bill for this...

A few days ago, Pope Francis and his spokesman Federico Lombardi directly contradicted the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church on contraception, including directly contradicting the clear words of Pope Paul's 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. Various "Catholic" individuals and groups quickly lined up to support Francis, including the often heterodox Filipino Catholic Bishops Conference. But a surprisingly large and strong set of Catholics--beyond the expected set of minority traditionalists--has now risen up to resist, as if Francis, after years of this this sort of thing, has now crossed an obvious line. Who knew that line would be you know where....