Free Republic

The honeymoon, as it were, is apparently over. A day after Pope Francis grabbed headlines by pronouncing two flight attendants man and wife while flying 36,000 feet over Chile, the conservative Catholic commentariat on Friday questioned the legitimacy of the impromptu sacrament and warned it could cheapen the church’s marriage preparation down the line. “Do you know what’s a ‘marriage’ ripe for annulment?” tweeted the traditionalist blog Rorate Caeli. “One celebrated apparently on a whim in an airplane whose celebrant cannot even be sure if parties are validly baptized.” For those who missed the news, Francis on Thursday presided over...

Leo Cardinal BurkeDAY 1 IntroductionIn the summer of 1982, I spent two months in Bavaria for the study of the German language, as part of my graduate studies in Canon Law. I offered Mass daily in the parish church, and got to know and respect very much the layman who cared for the sacristy of the church. Often, we visited after Mass and discussed spiritual matters.One day, the sacristan opened his heart about the evils of Nazism. He was in his late teen years at the time of the rise of the Third Reich. The question which haunted him was...

An anti-harassment training at a Catholic university in Wisconsin encouraged employees to report anyone they hear criticizing gay marriage to the school’s human-resources department. A presentation at the Marquette University training featured a story about a fictional wheelchair-bound employee, “Harassed Hans,” who had been overhearing his co-workers Becky and Maria talk about “their opposition to same-sex marriage all week,” according to an article in the National Catholic Register.

VATICAN, December 5, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Today, Pope John Paul II addressed a conference on "Globalization and Catholic Universities," organized jointly by the Congregation for Catholic Education and the International Federation of Catholic Universities. In his remarks, the Pope stressed that "It is clear that university centers that do not respect the Church's laws and the teaching of the Magisterium, especially in bioethics, cannot be defined as Catholic universities." Beyond abortion, the Pope spoke of faithfulness to church teaching on "the big questions in bioethics, such as the statute of the human embryo and stem cells, today the object of...