Free Republic

Spanish Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz has been confirmed by Pope Francis as the new leader of Opus Dei, following his election by an Opus Dei congress to the role. Ocáriz, 71, is a long time consulter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and performed key tasks under Pope Benedict XVI. Monsignor Fernando Ocáriz, a Spanish priest and consultant to the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith as well as other Vatican departments, has been confirmed by Pope Francis as the new leader of Opus Dei after being elected to the post by the group’s congress.Ocáriz becomes...

Bill Barr is plugged into, and gets his marching ­orders from, a network of reactionary Catholics, whose tentacles reach into the highest echelons of power. At the center is a sinister, secretive organization with a Latin name: Opus Dei, “the Work of God.” That’s the impression you might take away from a new profile of the attorney general in The New Yorker. All that’s missing are the hair shirts, cilices and murderous albino monks — the kind of thing too many secular elites believe about the lives of devout ­Catholics generally and members of Opus Dei especially. The winding and...

Pope Francis has demoted the leader of the conservative Opus Dei group from bishop to priest, revoking the structure ordained by Saint John Paul II. In an apostolic letter ironically titled “Ad Charisma Tuendum” (In defense of the charism), Pope Francis reversed measures enacted by Saint John Paul II in 1982 that ensured that the Opus Dei personal prelature would always be governed by a bishop, thus guaranteeing a certain degree of independence and flexibility. Francis has transferred the oversight of Opus Dei from the Congregation of Bishops to the Dicastery for the Clergy in a move widely interpreted as...

A former FBI agent convicted of espionage for Russia and serving a life sentence in a Colorado Supermax prison has died at the age of 79. The bureau confirmed Monday that Robert Hanssen was found unresponsive in his supermax federal prison cell at the ADX in Florence, Colorado around 6.55am. A cause of death has not yet been released, but officials say there is no threat to the public. Hannsen became notorious in the United States when he was arrested in 2001 and pleaded guilty to selling highly classified materials to the Soviet Union and later Russia for more than...

At approximately 8 PM on Sunday, February 18, 2001, there was a knock on my front door. At the time I was a Special Agent (SA) with the FBI, so imagine my shock when I opened the door and found the two top officials in the Division on my doorstep. I knew this couldn't possibly be good news, but they quickly sought to reassure me. "Everything is all right, but Bob Hanssen has been arrested." All right? Bob Hanssen was my brother in law, and a longtime counterintelligence (CI) official at FBIHQ, privy to a vast range of sensitive intelligence...

An Indiana Catholic couple whose child was removed from their home following disagreements over their son expressing a desire to identify as the opposite sex are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their case. Parents Mary and Jeremy Cox follow the Bible’s teachings on human sexuality, ascribing to the belief that God designs humans as male and female. Because of their religious beliefs and adherence to biological reality, they could not abide using feminine pronouns to identify their son, who demanded to be called by a female name after he told his parents in 2019 that he identified as...

FBI Internal Memo Warns against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’The FBI’s Richmond field office released an internal memo last month warning against “radical traditionalist Catholic ideology,” and claiming it “almost certainly presents new mitigation opportunities,” according to a document shared by an FBI whistleblower on Wednesday. Kyle Seraphin, who was a special agent at the bureau for six years before he was indefinitely suspended without pay in June 2022, published the document, “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” on UncoverDC.com. “In making this assessment, FBI Richmond relied on...

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Law-abiding Americans increasingly are convinced that their government views them as an enemy, perhaps even a “domestic terrorism threat.” A newly unearthed video may confirm those fears. Bureaucrats in numerous federal agencies apparently tag-teamed with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that demonizes conservatives and Christians, including groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty, in order to raise money and silence political opponents. The federal bureaucrats reached out to the SPLC, which conservatives criticize as a far-left smear factory, as they planned to combat “the domestic terrorism threat.” I’ve long raised the...

No major reforms have taken place at the Department of Justice or FBI even as its politicized bungling of prosecutions and investigations has made major news.Jeff Fortenberry is not the person you’d expect to be charged with any crime, much less the crime of lying to the FBI. Painfully earnest, the Nebraska Republican congressman is a devout Roman Catholic who has a perfect pro-life voting record. He served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and has developed a reputation for activism on behalf of persecuted religious minorities in Iraq. It was that last focus that ended up getting him in...

A new report just released by the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has offered shocking new insights into the full extent of the FBI’s efforts to use government power and resources to target, intimidate, and harass Catholics, pro-life activists, and other members of the religious community. The December 4 report found, among other disturbing revelations, that the FBI “abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists” when agency operatives in Richmond, Virginia, circulated a memo designating so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholic[s]” as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.” “The Committee and Select Subcommittee...

Boston police confirmed to Boston 25 News officers took a suspect into custody for allegedly breaking the arms off a statue of Jesus Christ on a crucifix outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross Tuesday night. A bystander had a camera handy to record the vandalism. Video shows a figure dressed in green climbing the statue and attempting to pry the body off the cross by swinging from the hanging torso. The Archdiocese and Cathedral are now reportedly looking to replace the statue. The Cathedral of the Holy Cross did not immediately respond to a request or comment from The...

Denver, Colo., May 26, 2023 / 13:15 pm Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco said Thursday that prosecutors’ decision to reduce the charge against activists who destroyed a parish’s statue of a saint from felony to misdemeanor sends the signal that attacks against the Catholic Church can continue with impunity. “It is clear to me that this course of action would not have been taken with anyone else. In fact, if the same kind of offense had been committed against another religious congregation or group, it would almost certainly have been prosecuted as a hate crime,” Cordileone said. Cordileone’s statement...

The Biden DHS document fits the administration's broader pattern of targeting pro-lifers.WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life women could be a potential domestic terrorism threat, according to national security planning documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL). One planning document comes from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Counter Terrorism and Threat Prevention and is dated January 29, 2021, just nine days after Joe Biden took office. Another document from August 2020 is included in the public records release and warns of potential violence stemming from protests against COVID-19 lockdown policies and unrest following the death of George Floyd. That...

Bashing Christopher Columbus has long been de rigueur among the liberal elite. Today, it has infiltrated our nation’s classrooms and poisons our public discourse. You know the mantra: Columbus was a greedy and egomaniacal villain who brought slavery, disease, “genocide,” and ecological ruin to a previously undisturbed land. Rather than honor this legacy of “hate,” the argument goes, Americans should celebrate the peaceful indigenous peoples who populated this hemisphere long before their lands were stolen by European explorers. The war against Columbus is cloaked in the lexicon of “diversity” and the rhetoric of “inclusion.” But what many of its foot...

New York City, N.Y., Dec 10, 2013 / 12:37 pm (CNA).- An atheist movie reviewer has criticized the new film “Philomena” as “another hateful and boring attack on Catholics,” saying that it unfairly shows the Church as exploitative and coercive. “Anyone who is honest understands that it lambastes the way Irish Catholicism played out in 1950s Ireland, using falsehoods whenever necessary to underscore the point,” said Kyle Smith, a movie critic for the New York Post. “Some like ‘Philomena’ for that reason. Some think there should be a little more art than diatribe to a film,” he continued. The...

With the Golden Globe awards airing last Sunday and the Oscar nominations coming out later this week, I recently took a look at the films of the past year and come up with my annual list of the ten best movies of the year.Overall, 2015 was a great year at the movies with a lot of great films arriving (including big budget fare like Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Jurassic World). There were plenty of box office failures as well (including financial flops like Fantastic Four and cinematic duds like Fifty Shades of Grey) but overall, the local cineplex...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio will not be marching in the nation’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parade, deciding to skip one of his city’s signature celebrations because the event organizers refuse to let participants carry pro-gay signs.De Blasio will become the first mayor in decades to sit out the traditional march along Fifth Avenue. “I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city,” said de Blasio on Tuesday during an unrelated press conference at City Hall. “But I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.” …

How dangerous is this for them? Dangerous enough that even Chris Matthews, who was last seen praising Obama’s beatific smile as worth 10 points in the booth this November, is talking about how “frightening” it is that the state might start dictating to churches in matters of conscience. If they’ve got Tingles saying stuff like that, imagine what undecided religious voters are thinking. A key White House adviser on faith issues said Tuesday that several organizations with ties to the administration have approached President Obama’s aides about finding a resolution to fast-growing controversy over a new rule requiring many Catholic...

C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe that Romney’s criticism of President Obama is hypocritical because as governor he did not lift the state-level requirement of contraception coverage. “The initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration, but from the Romney administration,” Doyle said.

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the "week-after" pill "ella" that can induce early abortions.