We have come to know and expect that whenever the pope writes or says anything of significance, he will earn the ire of professional provocateurs. Now, in the eighth year of Francis’s papacy, there’s a certain comforting predictability about the...
Catholic News Agency yesterday publicized comments from Pope Francis on same-sex civil unions that the agency claimed constituted “a shift from the perspective of [the pope’s] predecessors, and from his own more circumspect positions on civil unions in the past.”...
Today, Catholic social media unleashed a fury of reactions to the revelation that Pope Francis had indicated support for the idea of same-sex civil unions in a clip from “Francesco,” an upcoming feature-length documentary by filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky. It’s hard...
Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Fratelli tutti, presents fraternity as a necessary, Christocentric ingredient of and precondition for the betterment and advancement of society. Though the language of “fraternity” has not made many appearances in previous social encyclicals, and struck many...
Critics of Pope Francis often accuse him of disrespecting the traditions of the Church and rejecting the core values that make the Church what it is. Sometimes, they view Pope Francis’s openness to other cultures as proof that he wants...
Pope Francis’s third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship, is a gift to the Church and to the human race. Building on previous social encyclicals, including his own Laudato Si’ (2015) and Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009),...
The Catholic Church espouses a consistent ethic of life that requires the legal protection of all human life from conception to natural death. Thus Pope Francis wrote, in his 2018 Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate (“Rejoice and Be Glad”): The...
With the recent condemnation of the alleged private revelations of the Canadian priest Fr. Michel Rodrigue (whose claims were recently discussed by DW Lafferty and Mike Lewis for WPI) by his responsible ordinary, Bishop Gilles Lemay of the Diocese of...
We all know LifeSiteNews. Their articles are shrill, sensationalistic, highly biased, and frequently display the marks of a fanatical Catholic traditionalism. The titles of the regular blog posts of their editor-in-chief capture the obsessions that underlie their reporting: President Trump...
For years I worried that the QAnon conspiracy theory would find its way into Catholicism, but thankfully it seems there are few fervent Catholics who openly support QAnon right now. Recently, however, I came across an exception in “Friend of...
In my last piece, I showed how Archbishop Viganò rejects many teachings of Vatican II and the Council itself. How does he justify this, given that he is a Catholic archbishop who would naturally be expected to uphold the councils...
Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011-16, made headlines two years ago when he alleged, without evidence, that Pope Francis knew about the crimes of former-Archbishop Theodore McCarrick but employed him anyway. Recently, he...
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