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[Catholic Caucus] The Future of the Catholic ChurchIn a radio address back in 1969, a young German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, saw hard times ahead for the Catholic Church. It will “become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning,” he predicted, and the process would be painful. But though smaller, the Church of the future will have been “re-shaped by saints” to become a beacon for people seeking answers to questions of meaning, for which the arrogant secularism of those dark times will have no reply.While the saints whom...

TRENT, Italy, June, 1979, Address by Abp. Lefebvre: “The Second Vatican Council: what would the Fathers of the Council of Trent have to say about it?” An exclusive translation. Introductory remarks from the translatorThis is an excerpt from a long article in “La Tradizione Cattolica”( Year XXXIV – n°2 (124) – 2023). It is the transcript of an address the Archbishop gave in Trent on June 17th 1979. It was difficult to translate because as the Archbishop himself says in his introductory remarks: ‘First of all, please excuse my Italian, as I do not have complete command of the language,...

Why Do All the Bad Guys, and Some Good Guys, Still Defend Vatican II?“This is magisterium: the Council is the magisterium of the Church. Either you are with the Church and therefore you follow the Council, and if you do not follow the Council or you interpret it in your own way, as you wish, you are not with the Church. We must be demanding and strict on this point. The Council should not be negotiated in order to have more of these... No, the Council is as it is.” (Francis, January 30, 2021 Address) Why is it that men...

[Catholic Caucus] If You Like Your Conscience, Francis Wants You to Keep It... Unless It’s CatholicBlessed Pius IX’s words about “liberty of conscience and worship” from his 1864 encyclical, Quanta Cura, likely sound familiar to many faithful Catholics:"Liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society.” Can any rational Catholic deny the orthodoxy of such a statement? As it turns out, yes. Here is the quote from Quanta Cura in its expanded context:“For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not...

What Does the Asch Conformity Experiment Tell Us about Francis, the 2020 Election, and the Covid-19 Atrocities? While it has always been the case that fallen human beings are prone to both lying and believing lies, many of us have observed a remarkable increase in the propensity of seemingly intelligent people to believe preposterous lies in recent years. In many instances, those of us who have refused to believe those lies have been ostracized by family members, colleagues, and those we had considered friends. How, we must ask, do these otherwise normal people not only believe these preposterous lies but...

[Catholic Caucus] The Wheels Are Coming OffProphets are a pain. They bother us incessantly with the same somber warnings of doom. We don’t like prophets because we fear they will take away all the fun and pleasure of life. If you think that sin is fun, you would be right. But, because what we see is not all there is, because time flies and eternity await, because the way of all flesh is death and corruption, this world and the flesh must be submitted to other and higher, eternal considerations. The role of the prophet is to stand before others...

[Catholic Caucus] In This Wintertime, Only The Catholic Way Will Save UsChrist’s pilgrim Church has suddenly found itself in the late innings of, perhaps, transformation and schism, and few are around anymore to help save the day. But there is a Catholic Way forward.The Baltimore Orioles are winning (and will be for a long while), and on this humid August afternoon in Maryland, it might as well be a crisp day in early spring. I am a 10-year-old boy again and I’ve thrown off my jacket and gone into the side yard to play catch with my older brother, Danny....

[Catholic Caucus] The Mystical Body of Christ Must Purge the Impurities Introduced by Vatican IIIn his 1846 encyclical, Qui Pluribus, Blessed Pius IX charged the Church’s shepherds with protecting the purity of the Catholic Faith:“So, in accordance with your pastoral care, work assiduously to protect and preserve this faith. Never cease to instruct all men in it, to encourage the wavering, to convince dissenters, to strengthen the weak in faith by never tolerating and letting pass anything which could in the slightest degree defile the purity of this faith.” According to Pius IX, the shepherds should never tolerate anything that...

[Catholic Caucus] Cardinal Burke: ‘Populist rhetoric’ associated with Pope Francis undermines Catholic doctrineCardinal Burke criticized ideological ‘rhetoric’ that is becoming commonly used in the Catholic Church, warning that it seeks to replace the Church's ‘irreplaceable’ teaching.VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Cardinal Raymond Burke has issued a detailed critique of “populist rhetoric” often “attached to language used by Pope Francis,” which he said are “slogans of an ideology replacing what is irreplaceable for us: the constant doctrine and discipline of the Church.”The former prefect of the Apostolic Signature delivered his analysis of the relation between canon law and current verbal arguments via...

[Catholic Caucus] WYD's UNHOLY TABERNACLES: Two Different Tabernacles for Two Visions of God & the Religion He Gave Us“Almighty and eternal God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we kneel before Your Majesty, and thank You from the depth of our soul for the inestimable gift of the Catholic Faith, which you have deigned to reveal to us through Jesus Christ, True God and True man. We received this divine light in holy baptism and have promised You to keep this faith inviolate until death.” (Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s prayer for the triumph of the Catholic Faith.At some point over the course...

[Catholic Caucus] What Francis and His Defenders Spurn Most: God and His CommandmentsOne of the prayers immediately before Communion in the Traditional Latin Mass expresses the profound desires of Catholics to be delivered from all that can separate us from God:“O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, Who according to the will of the Father, through the cooperation of the Holy Ghost, hast by Thy death given life to the world: deliver me by this, Thy most sacred Body and Blood, from all my iniquities and from all evils; and make me always adhere to Thy commandments, and...

[Catholic Caucus] WYD: Bishop Attacks Priest Who Refused to Hand Out CommunionA priest of the neo-conservative FLUHM community placed Holy Communion on the tongue of young people who presumably wanted to grasp it with their hands at World Youth Day. One of them was Hendrik Roos, 27, a theology student and staff member at the "Bund der deutschen [anti-]katholischen Jugend" (Federation of German [anti-]Catholic Youth) in Münster. As a result, the petty-minded Roos grassed on the priest to the Münster diocesan newspaper Kirche-und-Leben.de. Münster Auxiliary Christoph Hegge then pompously called the correct administration of communion a "no-go." During the Covid...

[Catholic Caucus] Pope Francis says new council unnecessary as Vatican II ‘has not yet been implemented’Pope Francis again blasted traditional Catholics and said Vatican II ‘was very risky’ in a new interview.In a newly released interview, Pope Francis has downplayed suggestions of a third Vatican Council, saying that Vatican II “has not yet been implemented.”The Pope’s comments came as part of an interview he granted to the Spanish-language outlet Vida Nueva marking the 65th anniversary of the publication, to which the Pope is a subscriber. Speaking about his reaction to ascending to the papal throne, along with topics such as...

[Catholic Caucus] The Liturgists and the FascistsBy James BareselIn a 1964 letter to the editor of the Catholic Herald, Evelyn Waugh concluded: “Finally, a word about liturgy. It is natural to the Germans to make a row. The torchlit, vociferous assemblies of the Hitler Youth expressed a national passion. It is well that it should be canalized into the life of the Church. But it is essentially un-English…We pray in silence. ‘Participation’ in the Mass does not mean hearing our own voice. It means God hearing our voices. Only He knows who is ‘participating’ at Mass…Anyone who has taken part...

[Catholic Caucus] Neocatechumenal Way: Thanks God Benedict XVI Is Gone“The only solution was for the Pope to die. He did not die, he resigned. Thank God” - Kiko Argüello told Archbishop San Juan de Puerto Rico Roberto Octavio González Nieves during a meeting on vocations.The words of the founder of the Neocatechumenal Way are immortalised in a 2017 video. On other occasions, Kiko has referred to Benedict XVI’s resignation as a "gift from Our Lady".Argüello added that it was Bergoglio’s election that saved him, because Benedict XVI had asked his group to eliminate liturgical abuses, but – not surprisingly -...

Does the Abrahamic Family House Fulfill Vatican II?Above: St. Francis Church at the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, also titled “His Holiness Francis Church” in the official inscription (see below). Official website.Opening of the “Abrahamic Family House”Four years after Pope Francis signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together (Feb. 4, 2019) with Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the so-called “Abrahamic Family House” campus opened in Abu Dhabi (Feb. 16, 2023), the capital of the United Arab Emirates and the city in which the text was signed. The Document, which falsely claims that “[t]he pluralism and...

[Catholic Caucus] Majority of religious sisters in US are now 80 or over; more are age 95+ than under 40» Continue to this story on USCCB CWN Editor's Note: Supplementing data made public earlier this week, the National Religious Retirement Office of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has published a statistical report. Page 4 presents a detailed age distribution of numbers of men and women religious in the US as of December 31, 2022. There are 380 women’s institutes with 24,965 members, and 126 men’s institutes with 7,270 members. Over half of women religious—13,621 out of 24,965—are 80...

[Catholic Caucus] “Complexities and paradoxes in the history of the Church”: Vatican II, John XXIII, Ottaviani, and the Tucho Fernández challenge- by Roberto de MatteiThe appointment of Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has a symbolic weight of great import. In a certain sense, it represents the culmination of the pontificate of Pope Francis, who has meant to send a clear sign to those he referred to, at his meeting on 24 November 2022 with the members of the International Theological Commission, as the “backward-looking” of the Church.Another signal in this...

“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] What Do Our Views of Vatican II Imply About Our Views of God? “The results that have followed the Council seem cruelly opposed to the expectation of all, to begin with that of Pope John XXIII, then that of Paul VI . . . The Popes and the conciliar Fathers were expecting a new Catholic unity and, on the contrary, we have gone towards a dissension which, to take again the words of Paul VI, appears to have passed from self-criticism to self-destruction.” (Cardinal Ratzinger, 1985, quoted in Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s They Have Uncrowned Him, p. 231) As...