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Juventutem, a youth group that celebrates the Latin Mass with full permission from Rome, is part of a growing movement that prefers the traditional pre-Second Vatican Council liturgy WHEN tens – maybe even hundreds – of thousands of young people gather in Cologne next August for World Youth Day, one group will stand out from the crowd. For the first time, an estimated 2,000 or more youngsters will come together from some 20 countries to form Juventutem, an assemblage of various traditionalist movements that regularly celebrate the old Latin Mass, something most Catholics around the world have not done since...

HOMOSEXUAL priests in the Church of England will be allowed to “marry” their boyfriends under a proposal drawn up by senior bishops, led by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The decision ensures that gay and lesbian clergy who wish to register relationships under the new “civil partnerships” law — giving them many of the tax and inheritance advantages of married couples — will not lose their licences to be priests. They will, however, have to give an assurance to their diocesan bishop that they will abstain from sex. The bishops are trying to uphold the church doctrine of forbidding...

Should the Secretariat of State have such a high status in the Roman Curia? This is the question posed by some Vatican officials and commentators who fear that the dominance of the office has made the Vatican into an overtly political rather than spiritual force on the world stage. Indeed, when one takes a closer look at the concentration of power in this one office, the reasons for their concern become clear. The Secretariat of State, regarded as the principal executive body of the Curia, is responsible not only for the Church's international relations but also more recently for the...

Simon Caldwell talks to Tony Burke, whose personal faith journeykept the nation spellbound in BBC's The Monastery Tony Burke is on the verge of becoming a Catholic. This may come as something of a surprise to viewers of The Monastery, the three-part television documentary that charted the experiences of five men who spent 40 days and 40 nights with the 22 Benedictine monks of Worth Abbey in West Sussex. Tony rolled up for filming with the self-assured swagger of an easy geezer, declaring to the cameras that he had never had a belief in God, then raising eyebrows with a...

A gay clergywoman is to make history when she takes part in the country's first same-sex wedding by marrying her long-term partner. The Rev Debbie Gatson, 46, will join two other gay couples who plan to tie the knot in Brighton on December 21. Ms Gatson, of the Metropolitan Community Church, will marry her partner of 16 years, Elaine Cook, 53, who has two grown-up children from a previous heterosexual marriage. The ceremony has been made possible by the new Civil Partnership Bill which comes into force on December 5. There is a 15-day period before any ceremonies can take...

On the morning of Sunday, April 24, 2005, during his Coronation ceremony homily Pope Benedict XVI made a clear indication that he is distancing himself from the theory of evolution. Translated from the Italian, the pope stated: “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed , each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” To help get the point across even better, the pope used a play on words. According to Fr. Brian Harrison who knows Italian and heard the...

Il Santo Padre ha nominato Prefetto della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede S.E. Mons. William Joseph Levada, finora Arcivescovo di San Francisco (U.S.A.). S.E. Mons. William Joseph Levada Archbishop William Joseph Levada is a fourth-generation Californian, born in Long Beach on June 15, 1936. Except for a three-year interval when his family lived in Texas, he attended elementary and high schools in Long Beach, followed by four years of seminary college in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. In 1958, he was sent to pursue his seminary formation in Rome at the North American College, and took his graduate theological...

CELEBRATION EUCARISTICA And TAKEOVER On The ROMAN CATHEDRA OF THE BISHOP OF ROME BENEDICT XVI OMELIA OF ITS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI Basilica of Saint Giovanni in Laterano Saturday, 7 May 2005 This day, in which I can for before the time insediarmi on the Chair of the Bishop of Rome which successor of Peter, is the day in which the in Italy Church it celebrates the Festivity of the Ascension of the Lord. To the center of this day, we find Christ. And only thanks to He, thanks to the mystery of its to rise, we succeed to comprise the...

POPE BENEDICT XVI has been in secret talks with a group of disaffected Anglican priests who are planning to defect to Rome, taking thousands of parishioners with them, according to Fr Peter Geldard, Catholic chaplain of the University of Kent and himself a former Anglican priest. Indeed, had events not intervened, the then Cardinal Ratzinger would have met a bishop of the disaffected group last week. The schismatic Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) left the Anglican Church over the issue of women priests. Although very small in Britain, it has 36 bishops, around 2,000 priests and claims 400,000 communicants worldwide. "The...

Grace and peace in abundance to all of you! In my soul there are two contrasting sentiments in these hours. On the one hand, a sense of inadequacy and human turmoil for the responsibility entrusted to me yesterday as the Successor of the Apostle Peter in this See of Rome, with regard to the universal Church. On the other hand I sense within me profound gratitude to God Who-- as the liturgy makes us sing-- does not abandon his flock, but leads it throughout time, under the guidance of those whom he has chosen as vicars of his Son, and...

In the name of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, His Excellency Bishop Fellay, Superior General, welcomes the accession of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the Sovereign Pontificate. He sees there a gleam of hope that we may find a way out of the profound crisis which is shaking the Catholic Church, of which some aspects have been spoken of by the former Head for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and quite recently so in his preaching on the occasion of the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. His Excellency Bishop Fellay implores Our Lord Jesus...

Readings: Acts 2:14,22-28; Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-11; 1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35 At the end of this week when Pope John Paul has now been laid to rest, the thoughts and prayers of the Church start turning towards the election of the new Pope and what the future holds. Our readings today are particularly fitting because two of them involve our first Pope, St. Peter and they reveal a lot about what a Pope is supposed to be and do. They tell us much about the kind of man we should be praying for as John Paul’s successor. The reading...

“If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” The Gospel reading today is the last miracle which Jesus performs before His Passion and it is also the greatest miracle. But, as with all the other signs, He uses it as an opportunity to teach – He wants to obtain a confession of belief first – He wants His hearers to have Faith in Him. Earlier, Martha, the busy housewife, had been too occupied to sit at His feet and learn from Him...

In discussing why we believe in the Immaculate Conception, it’s important to understand what the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is and what it is not. Some people think the term refers to Christ’s conception in Mary’s womb without the intervention of a human father; but that is the Virgin Birth. Others think the Immaculate Conception means Mary was conceived "by the power of the Holy Spirit," in the way Jesus was, but that, too, is incorrect. The Immaculate Conception means that Mary, whose conception was brought about in the normal way, was conceived without original sin or its stain...

TONY EASTLEY: In the latest installment in the deepening ideological schism within the Catholic Church in Australia, the conservative Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell has banned a group of liberal Catholics from conducting a conference on church property. The annual conference of the group, Australian Reforming Catholics, was to have gone ahead next month at McKillop Place at North Sydney, a venue run by the Sisters of St Joseph. But on learning of the gathering, Cardinal Pell is said to have ordered two Sydney priests not to attend and moved to prevent the Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn Pat...

Having followed the debate regarding Catholic voting possibilities in the forthcoming election for the President of the U.S. of A., I would like to offer a perspective on this issue from the vantage point of a few thousand miles of distance from the heat of the controversy. I think most people (including conservative prelates and commentators) have missed the point with respect to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's footnote on "proportionate reasons" for voting for a "pro-abortion" politician. Most Catholic and secular commentators on "your side of the pond" seem to have taken this footnote as providing "wiggle room" enabling Catholics to...

There has been much publicity and confusion about a recent Vatican document on the Liturgy. Here, Paul Inwood, Head of Department for Liturgical Formation sets Redemptionis Sacramentum in context. Redemptionis Sacramentum is the name of an Instruction on the Eucharist published by the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments on 25 March 2004. It is trying to provide guidance on practices that are regarded as liturgical abuses, though the language that it uses has been characterised by some as "scolding". Many of the "abuses" listed have in fact never been seen in this country, others not recently;...

All eyes have been on Iraq and the handover. But it is time America and its allies turned their attention to Saudi Arabia and the militant Islam that thrives there – a creed which continues to fund and inspire al-Qaida Last autumn I visited a Sufi shrine just outside Peshawar in the North West Frontier of Pakistan. Rahman Baba was a seventeenth-century mystic whose Sufi verses have made him the national poet of the Pathans, and whose tomb has for centuries been a place where musicians and poets have gathered. A friend who used to live nearby during the 1980s...

A Catholic lawyer has filed heresy charges against Sen. John Kerry with the Archdiocese of Boston, accusing the Democratic presidential candidate of bringing "most serious scandal to the American public" by receiving Holy Communion as a pro-choice Catholic. The 18-page document was sent to the archdiocese June 14, but released to the public only yesterday by Marc Balestrieri, a Los Angeles-based canon lawyer and an assistant judge with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles' tribunal, an ecclesiastical court. "Heresy is a public, ecclesiastical crime," said Mr. Balestrieri, 33, whose complaint is posted at www.defide.com. "It affects entire communities. It is one...

THE VATICAN is preparing to relax the rules on the provision of the Tridentine rite, a senior cardinal has disclosed. Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos. prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, told The Lat in Mass, America’s leading traditionalist magazine, that the Vatican was preparing to issue a “juridical guarantee” in favour of the Tridentine rite, which was the Church’s official rite from the 16th century until 1962. Cardinal Hoyos’ remarks are a clear indication that Rome wants to embrace traditionalists by ensuring that they can attend old rite Masses if they so wish. The cardinal praised the Tridentine rite, and acknowledged...