Free Republic

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) -Pope Leo urged the world's Catholics to help immigrants in his first major document, which was released on Thursday and invoked one of the late Pope Francis' strongest criticisms of U.S. President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies.Leo's document, known as an apostolic exhortation, is focused on the needs of the world's poor. It calls for widespread changes to the global market system to address rising inequality and to help people living paycheck-to-paycheck.The 104-page text started as a writing project by Francis, who was unable to complete it before his death in April after 12 years leading the global...

Pope Leo XIV continues to make thinly veiled jibes against the Trump administration’s stance against illegal immigration.Speaking in front of thousands of pilgrims at St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Leo warned that migrants must not be treated with “the coldness of indifference or the stigma of discrimination.”Without singling out any country in particular, Leo said that Catholics should “open our arms and hearts to them, welcoming them as brothers and sisters, and being for them a presence of consolation and hope.”Leo explained that the church was living through a “new missionary age” that tasked its members with providing “hospitality and...

The strange death of ProtestantismThat broad body of Christian belief and practice known to the world as Protestantism originated in Catholic Western Europe in the 16th century, mostly the fruit of the highly original, expansive mind of Martin Luther, and then of the rather narrower and derivative mind of John Calvin. The pivotal doctrine of Protestantism was encapsulated in the easy and elegant slogan: justification by faith alone.In a Catholic culture in which the passion and death of Jesus on the cross were at the very heart of religious sensibility, Luther's message that Jesus's sacrifice was so overwhelmingly sufficient that...