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Some time ago I made it a policy to not criticize Pope Francis. My attitude to the Vatican corruption, immorality amongst the hierarchy, financial skullduggery and Pope Francis’ ambiguous teaching was simply, “He’s the Pope. He’s from a different culture and background. What can we learn from him? Is he a great pope? Time will tell. Is he a bad pope? I give him the benefit of the doubt and realize, sometimes we have good popes. Sometimes we have bad popes. Why complain about the Pope if you don’t like him? You can’t do anything about it, so just get...

This column has more than once examined the sophistical method of popular neo-Catholic blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who seems to specialize in advancing radically liberal positions under the guise of “conservative” Catholicism. Fr. Longenecker has now employed his method to neutralize the Vatican’s repeated instructions that homosexuals are not to be admitted to the seminary and, if detected, are not to be allowed to advance to ordination. In discussing the just-released document “The Gift of the Priestly Vocation” (Gift), Fr. Longenecker’s article begins by noting that Gift “re-affirmed the ban on the admission of homosexuals to seminary.” Indeed, the most...

Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which to live. Women were little better than possessions, children were considered undeveloped human beings. Slavery, violence, bloodshed, and revenge mingled with fire, famine, flood, pestilence, and plague. In the midst of the horror Christians rescued discarded babies, despised abortion, loved their spouses, tended the sick,...

1. An apostolic exhortation is not, by its very nature, a non-magisterial document. It is the content of a papal document that reveals its magisterial relevance, not its name or category -- no one doubts Familiaris Consortio, the John Paul II exhortation on his synod on the family, was extremely relevant in sorting out important Magisterial points. Amoris Laetitia itself does not say that it is not itself magisterial: what it says, in its highly explosive paragraph 3, is that the Magisterium does not need to be invoked or suffer intervention to sort all Catholic questions. On the other hand,...

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, posting on his“Standing on my Head” blog (appropriately named given the frequency with which pontifications seem to flow so freely from his other end), recently suggested that traditionalists (aka Catholics) are “getting old.” Obviously, he’s never been to a “traditionalist” gathering to witness the overwhelming presence of young, often quite large, families. “Not only are they dying out,” he wrote, “but their ideas are dying out.” It isn’t immediately clear what “ideas” he has in mind, but presumably he is speaking of such notions as the Social Kingship of Christ as taught with such stunning clarity by...

One of the sweet things about being a priest is being able to minister at a person’s deathbed. The veil between this world and the next is very thin at that point, and you can see so much. When I say you can “see” so much what I mean is that so much is revealed. At that point the person who is dying is usually very vulnerable and open. Their worldly facade is fading. Their accomplishments and pride are forgotten. They realize that all the stuff of this world will soon be left behind.Often the person is quietly sleeping. The...

Dwight Longenecker a graduate of Bob Jones University and a former Anglican priest is going to be ordained as part of the Pastoral Provision. He spent much of his life in England, but is back in South Carolina now. I reviewed his book Adventures in Orthodoxy before and so has Julie at Happy Catholic. I also recently read his St. Benedict and St. Therese: The Little Rule & the Little Way. He has a great Chestertonian way of looking at things and writing in such as way to make you look more closely to.On another note of former Anglican's now...