The vast majority of the Catholic commentariat will be discussing the pope’s new apostolic exhortation, Gaudete et Exsultate, which was officially released today. The topic of the exhortation is “The Call to Holiness in Today’s World.” Imagine trying to learn about holiness from the fellow who insists on telling us that hell doesn’t exist, that adultery isn’t…
At today’s conference in Rome on the state of the Catholic Church – “Catholic Church, where are you going?” – Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, one of the four dubia cardinals, made some stunning remarks about his cherished dubia colleague, Cardinal Joachim Meisner who died last summer. Burke now reveals that, after listening to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s…
Today, 7 April, the much-expected conference on “Catholic Church, where are you going?” took place in Rome. The conference was inspired by the late Cardinal Carlo Caffarra – one of the four dubia cardinals – who died last September. At the end of the conference, a Final Declaration was issued in the name of the…
During Easter, not only did a German priest and monk declare that he could well imagine a female pope in the future, but Cardinal Christoph Schönborn – whom Pope Francis has called a “great theologian” and to whom the pope entrusted the public interpretation of Amoris Laetitia – gave an interview in which he appears to express…
“Conservative” Catholics sometimes object to the traditionalist criticisms of Amoris Laetitia by claiming that Catholics critical of the document are in fact exercising their private judgment against the Magisterium just as the Protestant revolutionaries did, with the only difference being that the Protestants appealed to Scripture alone, while traditional Catholics appeal to Tradition alone. The…
Your Holiness, I pray for your humble patience with me as I try to understand recent comments. It has been reported that in speaking to an Argentine nun, Sister Marta Pelloni, you expressed that you see no harm in using certain methods to avoid pregnancy, in an attempt to help women ultimately avoid abortion. OnePeterFive…
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…
There are those who accuse as disobedient those who have expressed doubts, questions, and criticisms of the action of the Pope, but “the correction of confusion or error is not an act of disobedience, but rather an act of obedience to Christ and thus to His Vicar on earth.” So says Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke…
Yesterday, we told you about the situation faced by Dr. Michael Hesemann, a German Catholic historian who was suspended from Facebook for 30 days for expressing a true, if unpopular, fact about Islam’s adversarial relationship with the Christian west. This morning, I awoke to find that I, too, have been deemed guilty of thought crime…
In the wake of the 4 April revelation that seven German bishops have turned to the Vatican in protest against the recent decision of the German Bishops’ Conference in favor of intercommunion for Protestant spouses of Catholics, Ulrich Ruh, a German Catholic theologian, now claims that this move is also a vote of mistrust, not…
Yesterday, I received a text message from a priest friend, stating his intention to observe what some researchers believe is the actual day and time of Our Lord’s death on the cross: Today, at 3pm, is the day and time that Jesus died on the Cross according to all of the best research, though April…
