While my parents are well within the Baby Boomer age range, they were not hippies. But if they had been, and if there were extant film footage that depicted them frolicking in mud pits at Woodstock, or holding up “Drop Acid, Not Bombs” picket signs, I would not let my children see it. If such…
By Renzo Puccetti The release of a book on the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which documents the influential help of the then-Archbishop of Krakow, has become an occasion for Avvenire to renew an assault on the encyclical published 50 years ago. Its objective: to bypass the ban on contraception. The strategy is to divide Blessed Paul…
I once received a humdinger of a piece of anti-fan mail from a lady in Europe who was quite incensed by the lecture at Steubenville that became chapter 1 of my book Noble Beauty, Transcendent Holiness. Recently re-reading it, I thought it might be interesting to share what she wrote, and then my response to…
The first time I ever got on a motorcycle, I only rode it for a few minutes before I wiped out. I had borrowed it from a friend. We were seniors in high school. He and his younger brother had each had one, but the brother had left it — and all his other worldly…
In the wake of Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s recent strong rebuttal of the German bishops’ decision to admit Protestant spouses of Catholics, in individual cases, to Holy Communion, it is now Cardinal Walter Brandmüller who takes his own stance with regard to this new episcopal step, calling the German bishops’ referral to “individual cases” a “salami…
Cardinal Walter Kasper is turning 85. On this occasion, Katholisch.de, the news site of the German bishops quotes Anette Schavan – the German Ambassador to the Holy See – who once described Kasper in his presence as “pope maker.” To which tribute he modestly demurred. In a 5 March article, Thomas Jansen, the editor-in-chief of…
To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism Ross Douthat Simon & Schuster 256 pages $17.68 Hardcover; $13.99 Kindle Coming out in a few weeks is yet another good book criticizing Pope Francis for changing the Catholic Church. This one comes from even more prominent origins than the previous ones we have…
Editor’s Note: the following text is an interview with Cardinal Willem Eijk conducted by the Italian monthly magazine Il Timone and published in Italy. In this interview, Cardinal Eijk makes some courageous statements about important matters of our time. We present to our readers herewith a translation of the whole document, with the kind permission from…
LifeSiteNews reported a few days ago the inspiring piece of news that in Poland, 140,000 Catholics signed a petition to their bishops asking them to protect their teaching “from German errors.” At the same time, the German bishops had their spring assembly, during which they invited speakers who described the Polish Catholics as understandably “backward”…
Some may recall the scuttlebutt that arose about six years ago when the largest bishop’s conference in the world, the National Bishops’ Conference of Brazil (CNBB), issued a Pastoral Note to all Catholics in their country – roughly 130 million souls. We didn’t hear much about it stateside at the time, but the note was to alert Catholics…
Just after the recent renewed polite criticism of Pope Francis by Father Thomas G. Weinandy, the well-respected U.S. theologian, there comes to us another priestly voice of resistance, this time coming out of Spain. For some weeks now, Father Santiago Martin – the founder of the international association Franciscans of Mary with 10,000 members world-wide…
