Free Republic

[Catholic Caucus] Pope Francis closes Synod saying Church needs to ‘get its hands dirty to serve the Lord’Closing the Synod, Pope Francis rebuked the Church for being ‘seated in blindness’ and urged the Church to ‘take up the cry of the world’ and be ‘a Church that gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.’Closing the Synod, Pope Francis rebuked the Church for being ‘seated in blindness’ and urged the Church to ‘take up the cry of the world’ and be ‘a Church that gets its hands dirty to serve the Lord.’ Accusing the Church of already being unable to...

“The Church’s reform disaster: No one wants to see the causes of the abuse scandal. Yet they can be clearly identified”: Martin MosebachThis article by Martin Mosebach was published on February 10, 2022 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As far as I am aware, it was not translated into English at the time—but its message is more relevant than ever, with the elevation, as prefect of Doctrine of the Faith, of a bishop widely regarded as guilty of mishandling abuse cases.—PAK The Church’s reform disaster: No one wants to see the causes of the abuse scandal. Yet they can be...

[Catholic Caucus] Pius XII’s Humani Generis, and the Holy Ghost’s Protection of What John XXIII Rejected“The Holy Spirit does not always prevent the necessary consequences of our negligence.” (Fr. Alvaro Calderon, Prometheus: The Religion of Man, p. 201) In his One Hundred Years of Modernism, Fr. Dominique Bourmaud provided a sobering assessment of the way in which the architects of Vatican II so thoroughly disavowed Pius XII’s encyclical condemning the errors threatening the Church, Humani Generis:“Humani Generis appeared in 1950. The year 1965 marked the closing of the Second Vatican Council, which cast doubt on the fundamental points reaffirmed by...

Why the Pope Praises Modernist ArchitectsAbove: Azerbaijani First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva with Pope Francis.In his extraordinary Gifford Lectures of 2012, The Face of God, British philosopher and musician Roger Scruton talks about the “defacement” that occurs in temples and buildings when human proportions, cultural references, and richness of beauty are avoided in favor of empty, blank, machine-like, impersonal qualities. The discussion is fascinating; I can’t do justice to it in this short article, but I highly recommend the book, which is one of the most exciting I’ve read in a long time. Scruton addresses the iconoclastic drive that has dominated...