Free Republic

The pope’s series of doctrinal dubious statements, along with his questionable politics, have left faithful Catholics somewhere between scratching their heads and banging their heads against a wall. After the release of Pope Francis’s papal encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” earlier this month, Crisis magazine Editor Michael Warren Davis wrote the kindest thing one could say about it is that it’s incomprehensible. I would go further. The kindest thing to be said of Pope Francis’s entire seven-year papacy is that it has been utterly disorienting.His equivocal statements on questions of morality and faith, whether the comments be made in an encyclical, a...

Commentator Bill Maher has drawn backlash after calling Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett 'nuts' and arguing that Senate Democrats should make an issue of her Catholic faith. 'Chuck Schumer said Democrats won't make Barrett's religion an issue, but they should because being nuts is relevant,' Maher said in a monologue on HBO's Real Time on Friday. After hearings this week, the Senate Judiciary Committee set October 22 for its vote to recommend Barrett´s nomination to the full Senate, with a final confirmation vote expected by month´s end.

(CN) — In an effort to pull Christian voters away from President Trump, Joe Biden launched a new ad campaign Thursday tailored around the former vice president’s Catholic faith and values. “In a stark contrast to Donald Trump, who tear gassed protesters to pose for a photo op with a Bible in front of a church, the ads depict how Biden’s faith is deeply connected to his life story and commitment to public service and illustrates why Biden is the clear moral choice in this election,” the Biden team said of the rollout, making reference to the president’s controversial June...

President Donald Trump will nominate a woman to succeed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday, and observers expect him to choose Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Friday, after news outlets reported that Trump would choose Barrett, HBO host Bill Maher savaged the potential nominee for her Roman Catholic faith. Yet perhaps no one has given a better response to such anti-religious bigotry than Barrett herself. “Apparently, the pick is going to be Amy Coney. We’re going to be saying the name a lot because she’s a f***ing nut. Religion, I...

Teach About Marxism’s Evils We cannot allow another generation to emerge from our schools so ignorant of communism's horrors that they see no problem in courting, dabbling with, or even passively accepting one of history’s most noxious ideologies.
 My child’s Catholic school sent home a letter to parents this week recommending “conversations about white privilege” to encourage “compassionate hearts and confident minds.” Regurgitating the radical-left bile that fuels the fires of resentment and division will not enrich students emotionally or intellectually. Instead, Catholic schools should teach students about the evils of Marxism.Marxist apostles are orchestrating the chaos and violence plaguing...

The movie is free at the link until June 2.

With most of the nation under stay-at-home orders, the media are taking an upbeat attitude to the tragic lockdown. Most treat it as a temporary measure that we must endure before getting back to normal. Thus, the Internet is full of lists of things we can do while at home. They present lockdown as an opportunity for projects, hobbies, movies and home cooking that we never had time to do before. People can develop better family relationships and improve their marriages. All these things might help people cope with the crisis. However, I think this is a shallow approach. It...

New head of German bishops’ conference on track to ‘change’ Catholic sexual teaching The German bishops' conference has made it clear today that it does not wish to be anymore Roman Catholic.’ PETITION: Join faithful German Catholics in resisting bishops’ plan to ‘Protestantize’ Church Sign the petition here. March 3, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Today, Bishop Georg Bätzing of the Diocese of Limburg was elected the new president of the German bishops’ conference. In his first interview after his election, he touched upon the question of the Church’s teaching on sexual intercourse before marriage and on homosexuality. Asked whether he sees some...

[Catholic Caucus] Fr. James Martin: ‘Church must stop firing married LGBT people’ The pro-homosexual Jesuit priest issued a new video saying 'married' LGBT people, such as teachers at Catholic schools, should keep their jobs. Father James Martin, SJ, answers questions about 'LGBT Catholic' in a Jan. 28, 2020 Youtube video. NEW YORK, January 31, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― An LGBT activist priest has issued a new video in which he criticized the Catholic Church for dismissing employees who contract same-sex “marriages.”  Fr. James Martin, S.J, 59, discusses his beliefs concerning the Catholic faith and homosexuality on this week’s video.  “In the...

Pope Francis has apologized after he appeared to lose his cool when a woman violently grabbed his hand while he greeted pilgrims at the Vatican on New Year’s Eve. A video that went viral on Twitter showed an unidentified woman abruptly grabbing Francis’ hand from behind a barrier and yanking him towards her just after he reached out to greet a child during a visit to the Vatican’s nativity scene on Tuesday night. It seemed like the woman would not release Francis’ hand, so the pontiff slapped her hand before pulling his free. Frowning in anger, he turned and strode...

Pope Francis Unveils Globalist New World Religion at Summit with United Nations Leader The Pope wants globalism to replace traditional religion. Published 4 days ago on Dec 26, 2019 By Shane Trejo Pope Francis’ war on traditional Catholicism has been ramping up recently, and he castigated Catholics who believe in tradition and refuse to warp Biblical scripture to appease a godless world for creating a “minefield of misunderstanding and hatred.” “Rigidity and imbalance fuel one another in a vicious circle,” he said. “And these days, the temptation to rigidity has become so apparent.” “Tradition is not static, it’s dynamic,” Francis...

A teenager in France has been arrested after authorities say he tortured and killed a priest accused of sexually abusing him and his father. The revenge killing occurred on Nov. 4 at 91-year-old priest Roger Matassoli’s house in Agnetz, Oise, France, where the 19-year-old, identified only as Alexandre V., was working as a housekeeper, according to the Daily Mail. Alexandre claimed to have been sexually abused by Matassoli in the past. Alexandre’s father, Stephane, was also allegedly abused by the priest when he was a child. Matassoli was previously accused by at least four others of sexual abuse between 1960...

The Catholic Church must adopt new approaches to evangelization in a post-Christian West, Pope Francis said in a Christmas message to Vatican officials. “We need other maps, other paradigms that might help us change our ways of thinking. We are not in Christianity, not anymore!” the pope said Saturday. “We are no longer under a Christian regime because the faith—especially in Europe, but also in much of the West—no longer constitutes an obvious premise of common life. On the contrary, it is even often denied, derided, marginalized and ridiculed,” the pope said. How would you grade Pope Francis’ leadership of...

ROME - On Thursday top Vatican officials hailed Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, recently named TIME Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for her environmental advocacy, as a “great witness” of Church teaching on care for creation and the human person. Speaking to reporters at the Dec. 12 publication of Pope Francis’s message for the 2020 World Day of Peace, celebrated on Jan. 1 each year, Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the Vatican office for Integral Human Development, called Thunberg “a great witness to what the Church teaches on the care of the environment and the care of the person.” “What is...

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."