Free Republic

Every year, Catholics around the world donate tens of millions of dollars to the pope. Bishops exhort the faithful to support the weak and suffering through the pope’s main charitable appeal, called Peter’s Pence. What the church doesn’t advertise is that most of that collection, worth more than more than €50 million ($55 million) annually, goes toward plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works, according to people familiar with the funds. The little-publicized breakdown of how the Holy See spends Peter’s Pence, known only among senior Vatican officials,...

German bishops proclaim homosexuality ‘normal,’ adultery ‘not grave’ BERLIN, December 9, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) ― The Commission for Marriage and Family of the German Bishops’ Conference has come to a consensus that homosexuality is a “normal form of sexual predisposition.” Two German prelates have also claimed that Amoris Laetitia teaches that sexual relationships formed after a divorce are neither gravely sinful nor a bar to the reception of Holy Communion. On December 5, the German Bishops’ Conference published a press release detailing the results of an “expert consultation on the topic ‘The sexuality of man: how to discuss it scientifically-theologically,...

If House speaker Nancy Pelosi is a "practicing Catholic," then Sen. Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. If she is a practicing Catholic, then one hopes that one day, she gets it right. You cannot be in fundamental disagreement with a fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church and then wrap yourself in its vestments to proclaim you don't hate anybody. Funny: Cafeteria Catholic Pelosi doesn't invoke her Christian conscience when she supports her caucus's abortion-until-birth infanticide policy, the ultimate separation of mother from child.

The Italian daily Corriere della Sera revealed this week that the Vatican’s Sec. of State invested last February in Lapo Elkann’s eyewear and “lifestyle products” company as well as the Elton John film, using money donated by the Catholic faithful through worldwide “Peter’s Pence” collections. According to The Times, Rocketman features a liaison between actor Taron Egerton, who plays Elton John, and Richard Madden, who appears as John Reid, his former manager, deemed “the most explicit gay love scene since Brokeback Mountain in 2005.” Along with the Rocketman film, the Vatican also invested some €3.3 million in the production of...

HIROSHIMA, Japan - A picture is worth a thousand words which is one reason Pope Francis decided to issue his appeal for a ban on nuclear weapons from the only cities that have been attacked with atomic bombs. But sometimes, four hundred words are worth more than an image, especially when they describe a “scene of hell.” On Sunday afternoon in Hiroshima, Francis listened to Yoshiko Kajimoto, who was 14 years old when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city in World War II. She was some 1.5 miles from the epicenter of the blast. She fainted...

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has denounced anti-gay discrimination as reminiscent of Nazi-era persecutions and evidence of a "culture of hatred" that has re-emerged today. Francis made the comments in a wide-ranging speech Friday to an international penal law association. He said some public officials speak about persecuted groups the same way Adolf Hitler referred to Jews in the 1930s. He said: "These are actions that are typical of Nazism, that with its persecution of Jews, gypsies, people with homosexual orientation, represent an excellent model of the throwaway culture and culture of hatred."

Sorry for the vanity, it wanted to report on an event at our parish, St. Anthony of Padua, in Florence, SC. Joe Biden attended Mass yesterday and our guy good and conservative priest first handed him prolife literature, which Biden quickly set aside. Then, when Joe presented himself for Communion, he was given only a blessing instead. Did not see this in the press.

The Vatican announced the launch of the "Click to Pray eRosary" Wednesday. October is the month of the Rosary. The eRosary is an app-driven device that can be worn as a bracelet. To activate it, all you have to do is make the sign of the cross, similar to how Catholics begin praying the Rosary. Once activated, the wearer can choose between three different options to pray. There is the standard rosary, a contemplative rosary or a thematic rosary, which will be updated every year. The device shows the users progress throughout each prayer and keeps track of each rosary...

Cdl. Brandmüller: Amazon Synod Portends Pantheistic ‘Religion of Man’ Dubia author warns of 'spectacular break' with Catholic faith VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - Cardinal Walter Brandmüller is warning that the Amazon Synod represents an attempt to replace Catholicism with "a pantheistic natural religion of man." In a statement to LifeSiteNews and German-language site kath.net this week, the dubia author characterized synod architects as an agenda-driven Modernist cabal. "It would be a fatal error to think that the promoters of the current Synod of Bishops were truly concerned only about the well-being of the indigenous tribes of the Amazon forests," he cautioned. "They are, rather, obviously being instrumentalized in order to push an agenda...

As far as advancing the end times timeline goes, 2019 has been a banner year for Pope Francis and the coming One World Religion. We told you back in February that the pope has travelled to Abu Dhabi where he met with Sunni Muslim leader Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb. There the two men signed a global peace covenant called the Document On Human Fraternity For World Peace. From that covenant, the Higher Committee of Human Fraternity was created to implement this end times religious peace treaty. Now that committee has announced that there will be a fancy new headquarters for this...

Former Scientologist and King of Queens star Leah Remini said she has found “amazing” comfort in returning to the Catholic Church after leaving Scientology two years ago, contrasting Scientology’s abusive policies with Christianity. During an interview with Howard Stern Tuesday morning, the 45-year-old actress said she was so happy to be “reconnecting” to the faith of her childhood.Initially, Stern tried to lump all religions together as equally fanatical, but Remini jumped in, telling the shock jock he was making a big mistake.“I’ve come to the conclusion in my life that all religions are sorta nutty,” Stern said. “And, you know,...

I wrote the other day about the intention within bioethics to destroy Catholic healthcare. Today, a court ruling from California proves my point. A Catholic hospital known as Dignity Health refused to perform a hysterectomy on a transgendered male, as against Catholic moral teaching. The patient sued for discrimination, but the case was dismissed on the basis that the hospital was legally following its faith principles. Alas, a Court of Appeals reversed, reinstating the case to the active docket. Why am I not surprised? Dignity Health’s faith-based policies require that the institution “protect and preserve the bodily and functional integrity”...

When divinity and the world are confused and there is no otherness, any type of prayer is useless'Spain's Catholic bishops have warned that the increasingly popular use of Mindfulness is incompatible with "Christian prayer practices", and cautioned Catholics they risk "effectively abandoning the faith" if they engage in it. "Our pace of life, marked by activism, competitiveness and consumerism, generates emptiness, stress and anguish", said the Bishops Conference's Commission for Doctrine of the Faith. "In this situation, many people are resorting to methods of meditation and prayer that originate in religious traditions outside Christianity in response to a growing demand...

September 11 is known in our times as the date of a cowardly suicide attack by Islamic radicals which resulted in the massacre of over 3,000 innocents in New York City in 2001. But on September 11 nearly five hundred years ago, another Islamic attack was coming to its ignominious conclusion for the invaders. For on this date in AD 1565, the Great Siege of Malta was drawing to a close. The Turkish army, under the command of Mustapha Pasha, was making preparation for withdraw after a stunning defeat by the Knights of Saint John after a four month long...

Seattle Bishop Approves Funeral for Gay Shaman Who Committed Suicide In 2014 Abp. Sartain approved the funeral Mass of a homosexual priest who abused 10 boys The archbishop of Seattle, Washington approved Catholic funeral rites for an active, unrepentant homosexual whose highly publicized suicide party involved "marrying" his gay partner while being accompanied by clairvoyants.  It's not the first time Abp. J. Peter Sartain has gotten in hot water over a funeral. In 2014 he was criticized for allowing the funeral Mass of a homosexual priest who had admitted to abusing as many as 10 boys. His funeral Mass was concelebrated by...

WARSAW (Reuters) - More than 1000 people took part in a pride parade in the central Polish city of Plock protected by a cordon of armed police as LGBT rights became a hot button issue in Catholic Poland ahead of a parliamentary election in October. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has made hostility to gays a central focus of its campaign, depicting LGBT rights as a dangerous foreign idea that undermines traditional values. A pride parade in the provincial city of Bialystok in July was marred by violence after anti-gay protesters chased people through the streets and beat...

Nigerian Cardinal Says Stop Encouraging Africans to Migrate ROME — Cardinal Francis Arinze has urged Europeans to cease encouraging Africans to migrate to Europe, insisting that people are better off in their home countries. In an interview with the Catholic Herald last week, the 86-year-old Cardinal Arinze, once considered a top candidate for the papacy, said that when countries lose their young people to migration, they lose the people who can best build their nation’s future.“So the countries in Europe and America can sometimes help best, not by encouraging the young people to come to Europe as if they looked...

The Senate today confirmed Brian Buescher, President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. District Court in Nebraska. Readers may recall that Senate Democrats attacked Buescher for his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization. I wrote about this here. Sen. Kamala Harris was one of the Senators who led the charge against Buescher during his Committee hearing. His other main adversary was Sen. Mazie Hirono, one of the Senate’s dimmest members. Harris isn’t dim, but she’s a hard core leftist and an incorrigible opportunist. Thus, her suggestion that Buescher’s membership in the Knights of Columbus makes him unfit...

One of the advantages of the present media-driven furor to remove or demolish monuments to the Confederacy is that it is forcing numerous Americans, myself included, to dig deep into the history of the Civil War. And what a strange, convoluted period of history it is! The primary sources are plentiful, rich and deep which makes for endlessly fascinating reading. If the aim of the iconoclasts was to push this period of history even further from the national consciousness, or gloss over it with cherry-picked anecdotes allowing for knee-jerk verdicts, they have failed miserably. For my own part, I have...

Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz — both Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — are calling on President Trump to withdraw the nomination of a lawyer for a lifetime federal court appointment, accusing the nominee of opposing religious freedom and expressing anti-Catholic views. The nomination of Michael S. Bogren, a Michigan lawyer who was nominated to be a district judge for the District Court for the Western District of Michigan, has been met with fierce conservative resistance for the candidate’s likening of religious beliefs to the racist views of the Ku Klux Klan. Hawley, a Missouri Republican and...