After a deeply controversial guilty verdict in a child sexual abuse case stemming from decades-old allegations, Cardinal George Pell has been sentenced to six years in prison on on five counts of abuse of minors. He will be eligible for parole in 3 years and 8 months. Pell has maintained his innocence throughout the trial,…
Last week, it was announced by the Australian court system that Cardinal George Pell had been convicted in December of child sex abuse. The media had been prevented from reporting on the verdict because there was a hope of moving forward with yet another trial against the cardinal. That trial against Pell fell apart. Another,…
I’m not even going to attempt to present this one as a straight news piece. The inescapable feeling one gets when looking at the story is that it’s a farce. After months under an Australian court’s gag order, the December conviction of Cardinal George Pell on decades-old sex abuse allegations has just been announced. The…
A new survey conducted by Fr. Donald Kloster of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Norwalk, Connecticut, in cooperation with a statistician and Brian Williams of LiturgyGuy.com, has highlighted some interesting data from an underrepresented group of Catholics: those who regularly attend the traditional Latin Mass. The priest who initiated the survey has offered “both the…
Image: El Tribuno An Argentine newspaper, El Tribuno, the first one to have reported on the Zanchetta case, published documents on Thursday [February 21] that demonstrate how bishops, the cardinal primate of Argentina, the nuncio, the Vatican, and the pope himself personally knew since 2015 about the case of a bishop who now faces a…
Editor’s Note: Despite our stated concerns about the forthcoming Martel book about homosexuality in the Vatican, it presents information that is undeniably going to shape the conversation around the abuse crisis going forward. This, from Marco Tosatti, concerns an important piece of the puzzle. Sodom [which in English is entitled In the Closet of the Vatican], the…
The news broke very early this morning (about 9:30AM Rome time) that Theodore McCarrick, once the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, powerful Church fundraiser, and a kingmaker in ecclesiastical politics — including the election of Pope Francis — had been found guilty of depraved crimes by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)…
Confirming what has been widely-rumored in recent weeks, the Vatican has announced today that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who stands at the center of the Church’s re-awakened clerical sex abuse crisis, has been stripped of the clerical state following an investigation into allegations of longstanding abuse of priests, seminarians, and minors. When levied as a…
In response to an invitation to participate in a National Catholic Register symposium on the Clerical Sex Abuse Summit in Rome later this month, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has once again made public comments about the crisis in the Church. In his brief essay, he signals pessimism about the upcoming meeting, saying, “I am praying intensely…
On a winter day in early 2016, after months of attending the traditional Latin Mass at my local FSSP apostolate, I was asked what I thought of the Mass at a little parish called the Church of St. Bede the Venerable in St. Louis Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. You see, the Church of…
It has become a subject of heated debate: did Pope Benedict XVI validly resign from the papacy? An article we published late last year on the topic of so-called “Benevacantism” had over 900 comments. Across the Catholic sectors of social media, one sees this question discussed, often heatedly, on a regular basis. Today, three top…
