Free Republic

The “traditionalist” or “Fatimist” view of the post-conciliar “regime of novelty” in the Catholic Church has never been about grinding an axe; nor does it involve personalities, grudges or the other base motives that fuel polemics for polemics’ sake. If anything, the traditionalist approach to the current crisis in the Church has been essentially an elaborate and well-documented presentation of the obvious: that the trajectory on which the human element of the Church embarked in the name of Vatican II has been ever downward, leading to ever more bizarre and frightening outcomes. For decades the established Catholic commentariat, moving from...

The Catholic Church in America (CCA) seems to be unable to play a leading role in fighting the damaging socio-cultural trends of our time and now, for the first time since the colonial era, even faces serious threats to religious liberty. Why is the Church in such a weakened state? Some commentators would single out the priest sexual abuse scandal, but that’s only one small part of the picture. The answer lies in longer-run trends, which have been discussed by faithful Catholic commentators and scholars for some time but now come into sharp relief. Most of these, but not...

Imagine—just imagine, for the sake of the argument—that scientists in a future generation discover that the global-warming trend of recent years was not caused by human activity. If that happens, what will be the consequences for the Catholic Church, in light of the Vatican’s apparent embrace of the climate-change hypothesis? This is not-- repeat, not another column about the scientific evidence for or against the reality human-induced climate change. If you are inclined to respond by denouncing either the proponents or the foes of that theory, please stop. My own personal opinion on that theory is of little or no...

On November 6, the citizens of the United States re-elected perhaps the most anti-Catholic president in its history to a second term.Even sadder, according to exit polls a majority of Catholics voted in his favor, even after they theoretically had imbibed the bishops’ message, conveyed from the pulpit and in various other media, that no Catholic should vote for a candidate who favors abortion rights and single sex marriage and does not support religious liberty.What is going on here? Clearly, to borrow a line from the film “Cool Hand Luke,” “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”Simply put,...

  BY MICHAEL DAVIES Excerpts, Part 16: Oath of Succession and the Refusal The same Parliament that had passed the Act of Attainder passed the Act of Succession on 30 March 1534. The marriage of Henry with Anne Boleyn involved a change in the succession to the crown. Princess Mary was to be set aside as illegitimate and the inheritance fixed on the king's children by Anne. The Act of Succession was proclaimed throughout the kingdom on 1 May of the same year. The act is preceded by a preamble which is nothing less than an apologia for Henry...

Michaela Beard, 19, would be a freshman in her second semester at the University of San Diego, had she not left the school in disgust after the fall semester of 2004. This young woman from Bakersfield enrolled at the school with the belief that she was embarking on a four-year journey that would make her a stronger, better informed Catholic. She learned within the first week of her stay there, before classes had even officially begun, that this belief was far from the truth. "When I visited the school," she says, "it was on a visiting day and it...