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ROME - Pope Francis today begins a two-month period largely dedicated to outreach to Islam, bookended by a trip to United Arab Emirates now and one to Morocco in late March. If Francis holds to form, and there’s no reason to think he won’t, it’ll be a largely irenic effort premised on friendship and cooperation on shared values.In a recent interview with Crux, Bishop Paul Hinder, the apostolic vicar for Southern Arabia, asserted that Francis’s Islam strategy is a success, citing among other things new interest in the Vatican within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) composed of the UAE, Bahrain,...

Traditional Priest Suppressed: Pro-Gay Priests Protected The Church is where she is today because — in the Conciliar Popes — Peter chose to submit the Church’s teaching to the judgment of Modern Man, rather to the judgment of Christ the King!Father Vaughn Treco, Homily: The Father’s Grapes & the Children’s Teeth, on Christ the King Sunday, November 25th, 2018 An amazing sermon was delivered at The Church of St. Bede the Venerable. Last November, Father Vaughn Treco drew a line in the sand and called out the effects of Vatican II for what they were. The sermon can be heard...

Council Fathers on Ambiguity in Vatican II The fundamental historiographical question of the Conciliar period is whether the collapse of the faith that occurred in the wake of Vatican II was a result of the poor implementation of good conciliar documents, or were the Council documents themselves deficient in such a way that they directly enabled or led to the collapse? This is where the question of "ambiguity" arises; to what degree were the Council documents ambiguous? And is ambiguity always a bad thing? After all, the Bible is ambiguous in many parts, and we do not go around blaming...

Op-Ed: A French Historian muses about the "Anglicanization" of the Catholic Church: A Priest Responds Op-Ed: A French Historian muses about the "Anglicanization" of the Catholic Church: A Priest Responds Paul VI is paid a "solemn visit" by the high Anglican minister of Canterbury, March 23, 1966  French historian Luc Perrin, a Professor at the University of Strasbourg, and a well-known commentator of Catholic matters, published a long comment at the French Traditional Catholic page "Le Forum Catholique", in which he asked if the Catholic Church is going through a process of "Anglicanization". Our Contributor Fr. Richard Cipolla, DPhil,...

50 YEARS LATER: An Everyman Reflection on the Revolution of Vatican II “Given constant exposure to the new mass, a family’s faith would be largely extinguished within two generations.” - A faithful priest's prediction many years ago...  MILLIONS OF WORDS have been written and spoken for and against the revolution within the Catholic Church called Vatican Council 2. The Council was such a stark break with tradition, a hermeneutic of rupture as they say, that it demands a choice of every Catholic. Nothing was left unchanged following the Council, but most significantly the liturgy was progressively changed beyond recognition both...

De Mattei: Dare, Monsignore! TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER... Twenty-five years ago, on 8 February 1994, the European Parliament voted on a resolution that invited the nations of Europe to promote and give legal protection to homosexuality. In his Angelus address on 20 February 1994, the Holy Father Pope John Paul II appealed to public opinion worldwide, affirming that “the legal approbation of active homosexuality is not morally admissible [...]. The Resolution of the European Parliament has called for the legitimization of a moral disorder.The Parliament has unduly given institutional value to deviant behaviors, which do not conform to God’s plan”....

The Modernist Takeover of the Catholic Church: Cultural Genocide or Suicide? (PART II) IntroductionIn Part I of this essay we briefly survey of the state of the Catholic Church prior to, during, and after the Second Vatican Council and explore the use of the term “Cultural Genocide” to describe the destruction of a distinct international Catholic culture that once existed throughout the world.  Prior to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II – 1962-1965) that culture was characterized by prayer in a universal language, a common liturgy and liturgical calendar, and common beliefs that transcended national borders.  Although it still...

Follow-up Article - Paul VI: The Infallibility of Canonizations and the Morals of the Faithful Last August, Rorate posted an original article by Dr. John Lamont on the infallibility of canonizations. The article generated considerable debate, which prompted Dr. Lamont to write the following piece on canonizations and the morals of the faithful. Scrupulosity has never been a Catholic virtue. --- The infallibility of canonisations and the morals of the faithful John Lamont A number of discussions of the infallibility of canonisations have appeared recently in connection with the canonisation of Paul VI. Some of these, including a discussion of my...

Defending “True Devotion to the Chair of St. Peter”: A Response to Professor Douglas Farrow This article appears in the current issue (Dec. 2018) of Catholic Family News (click HERE to subscribe; current subscribers can access the E-Edition HERE).*****On Nov. 10, 2018, Professor Douglas Farrow published a long article on the website of the Catholic World Report entitled, “The Conversion of the Papacy and the Current Church Crisis,” in which in a friendly manner he criticizes several theses which I proposed on the occasion of the Catholic Family News Conference in Deerfield, Illinois, on April 8, 2018, speaking on the theme, Tu es Petrus:...

Writing in Catholic World Report, Dr. Douglas Farrow, a professor of Theology and Christian Thought at McGill University, joins the growing ranks of “mainstream” commentators who are, at last, one with traditionalists in sounding the alarm about what Farrow calls “the troubling Bergoglio pontificate…”. (I hasten to add that the very emergence of the term “traditionalist” in the life of the Church, signifying simply those Catholics who have continued to believe and practice the unreconstructed Faith after Vatican II, as is their God-given right and duty, demonstrates the gravity of the crisis that has led to this troubling pontificate.) I...

With events in the Church pointing more and more to the fulfilment of the Third Secret of Fatima, it is interesting to note that in Archbishop Vigano’s 11-page testimony of August 22 wherein the pope and 32 high-ranking Church officials were implicated in the sexual-abuse of minors, the archbishop cited the crux of the Third Secret, saying: “The corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy” This calls to mind the now famous statement of Cardinal Mario Ciappi, who read the Third Secret and who was personal papal theologian to Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul...

In 2013 Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor told Paul Vallely of The Independent, “Four years of Bergoglio would be enough to change things.” In a story published in March 2017, LifeSiteNews quoted from a speech given by former cardinal Theodore McCarrick that there was a pre-conclave plan to elect Jorge Bergoglio as the one who could “reform the Church … [and in] five years, he could put us back on target.”The LifeSiteNews article was itself about an interview with Cardinal Donald Wuerl that had appeared in the Jesuit magazine America. The essence of that interview was that, after the Second Vatican Council,...

Francis: “those who want to help me, pursue the Council in the Churchˮ “If you want to help me, act to carry forward the Council in the Church. And help me with your prayer. I need a lot of prayer”. So Francis responded to a young Jesuit who asked him how to support the Pope in his mission. Civiltà Cattolica published the transcript of the one-hour dialogue that took place in Vilnius with Jesuits from the Baltic countries during the recent papal visit.   “I don’t know what to ask for - Francis replied- but what we need to do today...

Vatican II at 56: Like all Totalitarianisms of the 20th Century, Vatican II will still cause great havoc The Second Vatican Council was opened in Rome exactly 56 years ago, on October 11, 1962. John XXIII had chosen this day, the Feast of the Divine Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin, a memento of the Council of Ephesus, as the day of its beginning. Irony of ironies: the whirlwind generated by the Council that would almost extinguish the Traditional liturgy of the Roman Church included the abolition of the Feast on this day and the transformation of the Octave Day...

RIP, Vatican II Catholicism (1962-2018) Among astute observers of the Vatican scene – okay, forget that; among warm bodies with evidence of consciousness – it has been known for several years now that we cannot expect Pope Francis, who is a major cause of the problems the Church is suffering under, to be a major part of those problems’ solution. This includes anything to do with clerical sex abuse and the death grip of progressive prelates. Each passing month, we see that it’s business as usual for the Peronist pontiff.But, as many writers have pointed out, this pontificate has been,...

The Church’s Disease Is Called Post-modernism. The Diagnosis of a Theologian Published as received. The author, a former member of the Franciscans of the Immaculate, teaches dogmatic theology at the theological faculty of Lugano, in Switzerland, and performs pastoral service in England, at St. Mary’s Church in Gosport, in the diocese of Portsmouth. Notable among his books is “Vatican II, a Pastoral Council: Hermeneutics of Council Teaching”, Gracewing, 2016.Of particular relevance is his reference, among the roots of the current crisis, to the intraecclesial opposition against the encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” the preeminent text of the magisterium of Paul VI, the...

Vatican II Springtime Update! First Ursuline House in North America abandoned by last sisters In 1608, after decades of tentative exploration, in the name of the not very Catholic Henry IV, King of France, Pierre Dugas, Sieur de Mons, and Samuel de Champlain founded the City of Québec on a hillside overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. The first years were extremely harsh, but in order for the colonization to advance, Catholic missions were always indispensible: and more than Catholic missions, Catholic sisters who could be a beacon for new families and, hopefully, help educate the girls born in this...

The big news of the day in Catholic (and other) circles concerns the announcement that Francis has issued a rescript to the CDF changing the neo-church teaching on the death penalty as stated in the so-called Catechism of the Catholic Church. (CCC)In short, CCC 2267 most recently reflected the wishes of John Paul II to say that cases of the death penalty as an absolute necessity for effectively preventing crime are “very rare, if not practically non-existent;” the quote coming from his Encyclical, Evangelium Vitae. This treatment left the door cracked ever-so-slightly for the just use of capital punishment;...

For the last several weeks, the Lepanto Institute has been investigating and reporting on a heretical priestly organization called the Association of United States Catholic Priests (AUSCP). This organization promotes women’s ordination to the diaconate (with eyes on the priestly ordination of women), homosexuality, priestless parishes, married priests, and a host of other heterodox positions.If you’re interested in having a better understanding of this international movement to spread heresy throughout the Church, previous Lepanto Institute reports on the AUSCP include the following: AUSCP’s Plan for Ordained Women and Priestless parishes Wester Participating in AUSCP ConferenceAUSCP’s Desire to Obtain Funding from...

The Second Vatican Council Is Problematic Itself – Bishop Schneider Bishop Athanasius Schneider has spoken out what everybody knows: The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was not only wrong interpreted but there are “some problematic affirmations of the Council itself”. Talking to CatholicWorldReport.com (July 6), Schneider criticises “ambiguous formulations” in the Council’s texts from where “a lot of errors" are now arising. Talking about the upcoming Synod on the Youth, Schneider fears that the Vatican's working document “accepted the propaganda terminology" of gay ideology. This is “contrary to sane reason and to the revealed law of God”, Schneider adds. He fears...