On November 12 in Syracuse, Sicily, the Grand Orient of Italy, Palazzo Giustiniani (GOI), sponsored the conference “The Church and Freemasonry: So Close and yet So Far?” The presenters at the conference included the theologian Msgr. Maurizio Aliotta; Bishop Antonio Staglianò of Noto, Sicily; and Sergio Rosso and Santi Fedele, adjunct grand masters of the…
A letter from Pope Francis praising episcopal guidelines that would allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Holy Communion in some cases while living in a state of objective grave sin has now been added to the official acts of the Apostolic See, conferring official status on what was formerly considered by many to be…
This week has seen yet another attempt of loyal supporters of Pope Francis to calm down the concerned critics of the pope with regard to Amoris Laetitia and the papal silence with regard to the dubia of the four cardinals. The Italian newspaper of the papal friend, Andrea Tornielli, Vatican Insider (La Stampa), published on…
A remarkable new book about the Francis papacy is set to be released in English this coming Monday, December 4th, after an Italian debut earlier this month that is rumored to have made quite a splash in Rome. Entitled, The Dictator Pope, it is described on the Amazon pre-order page as “The inside story of the most…
By a prodding of Providence, I walked into an old religious house some days ago in the French village where I live, where, as in the massive, once flourishing house of sisters across the road, the remnants of a formerly vibrant missionary order spend their waning years in retirement. The same saintly founder bequeathed both…
Holiness is a topic about which ignorance abounds and concerning which not much Catholic ink is spilled. It’s also one of the most critical to understand if we’re to have a clear idea of what it means to be Christian. Holiness is typically taken as a synonym for moral goodness. However, this is only one…
Editor’s note: The following is an interview conducted by Italian journalist Lorenza Formicola with Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. As former head of the Vatican Bank, Tedeschi is one of the better -known signatories of the recently issued filial correction of Pope Francis. Lorenza Formicola: It’s been a few months since the “filial correction” was published, and confusion remains.…
With the news that Pope Francis might relax the rule of priestly celibacy in certain regions, there has been much celebration in certain quarters of the Catholic world. Many of those celebrating see celibacy primarily as a burden that forces unnecessary loneliness onto priests. What they fail to see is that such loneliness can have…
In the middle of the fourth century, Saint Jerome remarked that the world “awoke with a groan to find itself Arian.” Arianism divided the Church and Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries and beyond by claiming that the Divine Logos, Jesus Christ, was not of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father and not…
Image: The miracles of St. Francis Xavier (see full image here), by Peter Paul Rubens Two good friends, fellow parishioners, are having coffee and donuts after High Mass one Sunday. Maximilian: I really enjoyed Father’s homily today. His explanation of the parable of the mustard seed and the yeast in the dough hit the nail on the…
There is a hierarchy of language. This is true for secular politics and cultural commerce, as well as in terms of religion. In this hierarchy, some languages are higher than others. JRR Tolkien, a philologist at Oxford, was quite aware of this. In his fictional world, which we know through Lord of the Rings, the…
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