Where Peter Is

there is the Church

Where Peter Is

Author: Mike Lewis

5

abuse crisis / Cardinal McCarrick / Church News / Scandal / Uncategorized

McCarrick and the abuse of seminarians

On June 28, I posted about the recent revelations of credible and substantiated abuse accusations against Cardinal McCarrick by a former teenage altar boy. I also discussed Cardinal Joseph Tobin’s revelation that there have been three past accusations directed at McCarrick by adults in New Jersey, and two had been settled out of court. At the time, I also mentioned that “over the last week an increasing number of sordid stories about his sexual harassment...

9

abuse crisis / Cardinal McCarrick / Uncategorized

Cardinal McCarrick and the Church’s Ticking Time Bombs

Last week’s revelation that 87-year-old retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been removed from public ministry on charges that he twice molested a teenage boy in New York in 1970 and 1971 marks a new low for the Catholic Church in the United States. All these years, McCarrick apparently knew he was a ticking time bomb, a man with an alleged history of sexual predation who had heretofore avoided the hammer. At 87 years old, he’d...

14

Cardinal Burke / Immigration / Pope Francis / Social Justice

Raymond Arroyo: Party over Faith

Can someone explain to me why Raymond Arroyo still has a show on EWTN? Bad enough that whenever Arroyo hosts Kevin Appleby, from the Center for Migration Studies and a longtime staffer on the issue at the bishops’ conference, he’s paired with someone from the viciously anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform. This would be like hosting Cardinal Timothy Dolan, [former] chair of the bishops’ Pro-Life Activities Committee, and pairing him with Cecile Richards from...

12

Amoris Laetitia / Marriage / Pope Francis / Pope Paul VI / Uncategorized

Is it really confusion?

When I read Pedro Gabriel’s excellent exegesis of Chapter 8 of Amoris Laetitia last week, I was impressed by how thoroughly and definitively he had affirmed what the exhortation says about the reception of Holy Communion for those in irregular situations. His piece also established a clear link from Amoris Laetitia to the Buenos Aires guidelines. After reading Pedro’s piece, no one should ever be able to insist on alternative interpretations to that aspect of...

0

Amoris Laetitia / Cardinal Caffarra / Church News / Uncategorized

Not a sidestep, but an affirmation

For two years, critics of Amoris Laetitia have pointed to Poland as a celebrated example of a national bishops’ conference upholding their view of “orthodoxy.” Beginning in 2016, when a senior Polish bishop vowed to never allow communion to the divorced and remarried under any circumstances, the common view was that the Polish Church rejects the pastoral model that Pope Francis laid out in chapter 8 of the document and further clarified with the affirmation...

41

Pope Francis / Pope Paul VI / Radical Traditionalists / Uncategorized

Marcel Lefebvre: Father of Traditionalist Dissent

I have long argued that the rebellion against the Holy Father is at its core the same rebellion staged by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX)  and other extreme traditionalists since the 1970s. A recently released transcript of a meeting between Pope Paul VI further confirms my position, that radical traditionalists long ago cast aside any convincing pretense of respecting papal primacy, and demonstrates that the same line of argumentation used against Pope Paul...

5

Pope Francis / Uncategorized

Looking forward to June at WPI

Thank you to all our readers and supporters for a great month of May. We’ve continued our growth and continued to expand our reach. It has been a joy and a privilege to support the Church and Pope Francis through our website. This month, we plan to make a major site upgrade and we have finally activated our Twitter account (@where_peter_is). We will be posting all of our new content and other interesting links and...

12

Amoris Laetitia / Pope Francis / Uncategorized

The shock of developing doctrine: A response to Fr. Dwight Longenecker

“We cannot determine whether a professed development is truly such or not, without some further knowledge than an experience of the mere fact of this variation. Nor will our instinctive feelings serve as a criterion. It must have been an extreme shock to St. Peter to be told he must slay and eat beasts, unclean as well as clean, though such a command was implied already in that faith which he held and taught; a...

39

Amoris Laetitia / Cardinal Burke / Pope Francis

Fundamentalist Catholics and Ecclesial Catholics

The division among certain Catholics that began with the election of Pope Francis and became pronounced upon the public release of the four cardinals’ dubia continues to widen. Catholics, many of whom were close allies during the pontificates of St John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, find themselves looking across an unbridgeable and widening canyon between two dramatically different ways of how to understand the Church. What appeared at first to be a debate...

15

Amoris Laetitia / Cardinal Burke / conspiracy theories / Pope Francis / Uncategorized

Critics of Pope Francis, What’s your End-Game?

In the debate over the doctrinal soundness of Amoris Laetitia — and of the orthodoxy of Pope Francis’s teaching in general — is one area where papal critics cannot provide a single clear or compelling answer: how this ends. While they can be quite clear in explaining where they think they are right and Pope Francis is wrong, there is a lack of clarity about when or how they think Francis’s “errors” will be corrected,...

27

Amoris Laetitia / Pope Francis / Uncategorized

Who should “Joe Catholic” listen to?

It’s fairly evident that the debate over Amoris Laetitia has mostly stayed within the domain of a very small subset of Catholics: those who follow Vatican affairs closely, those who consume EWTN and other Catholic media, and those who enjoy reading papal encyclicals and theological writing. The typical practicing Catholic, thankfully, is quite unaware of the civil war that’s raging in academia, within the walls of the Vatican, and (perhaps most intensely) on social media....