Free Republic

A referendum on "Free Sundays" for all Polish workers is expected next year Poland’s leading Catholic bishops have spoken out in support of establishing a ban on Sunday commerce. Speaking on Polish Radio, Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki claimed “Free Sundays are what all Catholics, non-Catholics and non-believers need.” The interview came before the upcoming meeting of the Bishops Conference, which is expected to support the proposal. Of course, the ban could only be instituted by the Polish government. BBC reports that the bishops have taken great care to appeal to the government through secular terms, keeping the religious aspects of “Free...

“Loving God with Our Mouth and Ears” (The Ten Commandments) We started off this series on the Ten Commandments with, obviously, the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods.” There is but one God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, namely, the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no other. We should fear, love, and trust in this God above all things. So this is the First--and foremost--Commandment, the one that encompasses all the commandments and runs through them all. “You shall have no other gods.” That’s what we should not do. But Moses also...

Pope Francis with the Harlem Globetrotters at the Wednesday general audience in St. Peter's Square, May 6, 2015. Credit: © L'Osservatore Romano. Vatican City, May 7, 2015 / 03:19 pm (CNA).- On Thursday Pope Francis demonstrated his keen interest in uniting sports with faith, telling members of Italy's Lazio club not to let training or competitions trump the spiritual essentials. “Sometimes it happens that a guy or a girl, due to training and competitions, forgets about Mass (and) catechesis...this is not a good sign; it means we have lost the scale of values,” the Pope told members of Italian sports...

There is no question that something about Pope Francis catches the imagination of those who might otherwise have nothing to do with the Catholic Church. From the displays of humility that splash across the news to the refusal to live in the apostolic palace or follow time-honored papal traditions to the endless string of off-the-cuff comments signaling a change in rigid doctrinal certainty, Pope Francis marches to the beat of his own drum. And the song it’s playing is ¡Hagan lío! – “Make a mess.” Amidst controversial papal comments this week that “All Christians and men of good will are...

He was not what she was expecting, in several ways. The man who would one day be Pope Francis had come to hold a service far from the grandeur of the great cathedral of Buenos Aires