In light of today’s news that the pope has “changed the Catechism of the Catholic Church about the death penalty, saying it can never be sanctioned,” we are reprinting this as a reference point for concerned Catholics. –SS, 8/2/2018 When the first version of this column was originally published in March 2015, it was occasioned…
Justice Anthony Kennedy recently announced his resignation from the United States Supreme Court. Good riddance. What Shakespeare said about a traitor’s life in Macbeth applies equally well to Kennedy’s life on the Supreme Court: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” In other words, Kennedy’s decision to resign during the current presidency…
Translator’s Note: Roberto de Mattei’s paper, presented today in Rome, is entitled “The roots and historical consequences of Modernism”. It provides a detailed study of the origin of the present theological confusion in the Church in the ideas embraced at the time of the so-called “Modernist crisis” of the early 20th century. The teaching of Maurice…
In light of the revelations about the secret life of Cardinal Theodore “Uncle Teddy” McCarrick — a man who has been described with alarming frequency over the years (even though these warnings have gone largely unheeded) as a homosexual predator who took advantage of vulnerable seminarians under his spiritual authority — we wish to present…
Imagine eating the sun—and imagine you could do it without perishing. What would happen? You would receive into your body the source of light and warmth. You would have within you all the light and heat that you could possibly ever need or want. No more heating bills, no more lightbulbs, no more winter trips…
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to…
Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of the “transvaluation of all values”: the inversion of our conceptions of good and evil in this post-Christian era. What had been regarded as good—humility, self-denial, obedience, love of the poor and of poverty, looking towards a world to come—was, in his system, to be seen as evil, and what had been…
It was a long day of meetings between the delegation of the German Bishops’ Conference and the Vatican to discuss intercommunion with Protestants, which the German Bishops have approved by a majority vote for Protestants who are married to Catholics. Notably absent from the Vatican delegation was Cardinal Robert Sarah, perhaps because of his clearly…
Editor’s note: The following is the response of Prof. Paolo Pasqualucci to some criticism of his previous article, “‘Points of Rupture’ of the Second Vatican Council,” available here. The critical remarks: “Articles such as this one, written at a time of great confusion, only inflict greater uncertainty and anxiety upon the faithful.” The author so often…
It has become an inevitability that in our attempts to understand the current crisis in the Church, we must look back upon the events that precipitated it. There is perhaps no more debated topic in this regard than the question of whether the Second Vatican Council was unjustly marred by a poor implementation and interpretation —…
When contemporary clergy preach about our relationship to the Father in Christ, they will refer to Christians, almost without exception, as “God’s sons and daughters.” The new document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Placuit Deo, falls in line: The Christian faith has illustrated, throughout its centuries-long history, by means of multiple…
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