Pope Francis visited the Lutheran Community of Rome on 15 November 2015. Among those who accompanied him was one influential cardinal: Cardinal Walter Kasper; not present was another influential cardinal: Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF). These two cardinals, both German, are very different – the former a promoter…
Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia has elicited a wide variety of reactions. Most Catholic media have accentuated the positive: this document clearly rejects abortion, the idea of calling same-sex couples “married,” and a formal process of offering Holy Communion to married Catholics separated from their spouses and living in adultery unless they commit to be celibate…
Yesterday, Michael Voris of Church Militant released a very difficult and courageous episode of the Vortex. In it, he alleged that the New York Archdiocese, in apparent retribution for his investigation of the strong homosexual culture within the clergy there, intended to publicly reveal his own past sins. If true, this would amount to an egregious violation of…
On 17 April, the head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx – who is the archbishop of Munich – gave a homily during Holy Mass in Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria. In this homily, the cardinal – who is also a member of the pope’s “Council of Nine Cardinals” – said that “there is no situation…
On Twitter, I follow the hashtag #Amorislaetitia, which allows me to see all the self-categorized tweets on this topic. While this has proven not entirely useful since the exhortation was released 11 days ago, today was different. Today, I saw a series of tweets from Matthew Schmitz, the literary editor of First Things. I am unfamiliar with…
I’ve been trying for a long time to fathom what makes me uneasy about the concept and rhetoric of “social justice.” Michael Novak pointed out recently that part of the problem is taking social “justice” not, as the use of traditional vocabulary would suggest, as a true virtue present in individuals, but rather as a…
Last September, in the leadup to the second synod, I found myself overwhelmed. The deluge of bad news washed over me like waves in a tempest, and the feeling of defeat that came with it was, at times, crushing. The game was rigged, the deck was stacked, the fix was in, and everyone knew it — even…
In my tribute to Mother Angelica last month, I asserted that in large part, the network she founded no longer spoke truth to power. I wrote: It is my belief that EWTN’s growth has come at a serious cost: they have traded the credibility that once came with Mother’s tenacity in sharing the “hard sayings” of Catholic…
Unlike other Catholic websites, I have elected to keep our comment boxes open and free thus far. I encourage frank and forthright discussion. I allow opinions that disagree with us and our positions as stated in the articles and posts we publish, provided that those who hold them are respectful in their presentation. I understand that…
After a few earlier words of Bishop Bernard Fellay on 10 April on the Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetita (where he speaks of a boat with a hole below the waterline, which is now prone to sink), the SSPX has now published a more formal statement and published it on its own website (in French). Father Mathias Gaudron, of…
Yesterday, we broke the story that Pope Francis had made comments on his plane presser (returning from Greece) indicating with a simple, emphatic affirmative that yes, there were concrete changes to the way the Church is going to deal with the divorced and remarried following the exhortation. Some have (predictably) disputed those claims. There is…
