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[Catholic Caucus] Theologians, cardinals defend pope’s theology in wake of heresy charge ROME - In the wake of an April 30 open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy signed by 19 clergymen and scholars, demanding the pontiff’s resignation, theologians and cardinals at a conference in Rome on Wednesday instead praised Francis’s theology and magisterium.“Pope Francis is the pope, and when he speaks it’s magisterium,” Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, general secretary of the Synod of Bishops, told Crux after the event.The symposium, called “Theology and Magisterium in the Church with Pope Francis,” took place May 8 in Rome at the Pontifical...

Archbishop Bugnini: The Man Behind the Post-Vatican II Mass The concept of “living and prayerful assembly” looks tragic in retrospect; it led to a collapse on every front. And soon after the “New Mass” was promulgated, a 1971 petition in the London Times, signed by high-profile personalities such as Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene and Yehudi Menuhin, called for the survival of the Tridentine Mass. The response of intellectuals and artists is forgotten now, but at the time, it must have stung the reformers. The exile of the average laity, however, seems to have never given the reformers a second’s remorse;...

[Catholic Caucus] The future of Catholicism in America CHICAGO (RNS) — “We’re not a church with a mission, we’re a mission with a church,” Cardinal Blase Cupich told the folks who showed up at Loyola University of Chicago last Thursday evening to hear their archbiship talk with a couple of academics and a journalist about the future of Catholicism in America.It was a subtle and clever remark, not least because “mission” as a religious term originates with the Jesuits, who were sent (Lat. missi) to the ends of the Earth “for the greater glory of God and the salvation of...

Mar 22 Why Were Non-Catholic 'Observers' Influencing Vatican II's Documents? Editor’s Note: In this new article, CFN contributor Stephen Kokx quotes testimony from several sources which demonstrate that a variety of non-Catholics (mostly Protestants) who were invited to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as “observers” clearly influenced the discussions—and even the documents—of the Council. As one quoted source reveals, “[A]lthough we had no direct ‘voice’ on the council floor, we did indeed have an indirect voice through the many contacts that were possible with the Fathers and their indispensable strong arms, the periti.”A little less than 100 years prior to...

15 mar The Society of Jesus Adrift. The Indictment of a Great Jesuit “It seems that I am in good Company….” This is how an exultant Antonio Spadaro hailed via Twitter the release of “Confesiones de jesuitas,” the expanded new edition of a book published back in 2003 with the title “31 jesuitas se confiesan,” in which he too now appears together with 37 other confreres, including several of the highest rank, living and dead, from Avery Dulles to Carlo Maria Martini, from Roberto Tucci to Tomás Spidlik, from Jon Sobrino to Robert F. Taft, from Adolfo Nicolás to...

This prophetic 1940s Catholic magazine can help end the crisis in the Church March 4, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) —  One of the worst lies about the Catholic Church as it existed before Vatican II is that it was rigid, legalistic, and imbued with clericalism. Anyone who’s read pre-conciliar papal writings on Catholic Action (see here, here, and here) knows that such charges are entirely bogus. Catholics living in the late 19th and early 20th century were anything but unthinking, rosary-counting dullards. (Even if they were, at least they prayed and didn’t dissent from Church doctrine – something that can’t be...

Why Is Francis So Afraid of the Roman Rite? During a February 14 audience for the participants in the plenary of the Liturgy Congregation, Pope Francis read a text about the liturgical development of the past fifty years which sounded like a parody compared to what really happened. Francis claimed that in the 1960s the Church's "praying tradition" needed "renewed expressions, without losing anything of its millennial wealth." However, as a result of the changes, the "millennial wealth" was lost, and the "renewed expressions" turned out to be a flop. As if he wanted to make fun about the disaster,...

Audience with participants in the Plenary of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 14.02.2019 This Plenary comes at a significant time. Fifty years have passed since, on 8 May 1969, Saint Paul VI wished to establish the then Congregatio pro Cultu Divino, in order to give shape to the renewal desired by Vatican Council II. It was a matter of publishing the liturgical books according to the criteria and decisions of the Council Fathers, with a view to fostering, in the People of God, “active, conscious and pious” participation in the mysteries of Christ (cf....

Feb 9 First Bishop Schneider, Now Cardinal Müller: Resisting the Errors of Francis Promoting Catholic Truth in a Pluralistic Society 0 Feb 9 Feb 9 First Bishop Schneider, Now Cardinal Müller: Resisting the Errors of Francis Brian McCall CFN Blog, Brian McCall Yesterday afternoon, shortly after CFN’s report on Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s new statement was published, news broke that Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), has also released a statement—a “Manifesto of Faith” (full text below, courtesy of LifeSiteNews)—in response to what he calls “growing confusion about the doctrine of the...

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...