“At first,” says Kansas City Chiefs Kicker Harrison Butker in an interview with EWTN, “it pushed me away. I was like…ah this is just, this is just not me. It doesn’t go with the world….it’s just like kind of old school traditional stuff. But then I think that also attracted me because it was so different from…
The recent Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church, accusing Pope Francis of heresy, precipitated a large number of commentaries. A common response was to cite ecclesiastical law for the proposition that “no one judges the pope” and then ask, “So what is the point of accusing him of heresy?” This is another…
Recently, my grandson Thomas received his first Holy Communion at a parish I have visited only a few times. My wife and I assist at Mass at a different parish, in part because it offers the traditional Latin Mass. The day after Thomas’s first Holy Communion at the Novus Ordo church, some children at our…
A new papal motu proprio letter, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, makes some important changes to the way the Vatican handles clerical sexual abuse. The plan, promulgated today, goes into effect on June 1, 2019. “The crimes of sexual abuse,” the letter reads, “offend Our Lord, cause physical, psychological and spiritual damage to the victims and…
Reactions to the Open Letter accusing Pope Francis of holding seven heretical propositions — a letter that now bears the signatures of 81 clergy, religious, and scholars — have ranged from strong support (Zmirak, Coulombe, Verrecchio) to sympathetic critiques (Lawler, Feser, Weinandy, Shaw) to undisguised hostility (Akin, Armstrong, Condon, most media outlets). The authors in…
There have been a number of developments on the Open Letter accusing the pope of heresy since I first summarized it in this space on April 30. The first of these is that the number of scholars who have signed it has gone from 15 to 81. (At LifeSite, Maike Hickson has been updating the list…
We are in the midst of the Easter season: He is Risen, alleluia, alleluia! We read in the book of the Apocalypse that Jesus Christ is “the first and the last” (22:13). Indeed, He is first in the eternal sense, but He is also first in what we as Christians are to value. We know…
Several days have now gone by since the release of an open letter to the world’s Catholic bishops which accuses Pope Francis of the delict of heresy (see “Prominent clergy, scholars accuse Pope Francis of heresy in open letter”). The full document issued by these scholars may be found here. As I said in a prior article…
Is it possible to take private beliefs a step further when you’re 63, a bit shy, and have a head full of gray hair? Is it possible to protest in front of an abortion clinic and actually save a life on an ordinary Monday morning? “Yes it is,” says Judy.* Here’s her story, as told…
Sanctification: Neither as easy nor as impractical as we think Many people are wondering how to handle the current crisis in the Church, what they can do in practical terms, in a situation that seems increasingly apocalyptic and completely out of their hands. We’ve been dissatisfied with the answers we’ve had so far from the…
In the seemingly interminable war between Catholics and Pope Francis, another salvo has been fired. This time, it lands a bit closer to the target. In a 20-page open letter addressed not to the pope, but to the bishops of the Church, 19 Catholic scholars, some of them clergy, state that they “accuse Pope Francis of…
