May 27, 2016, Friday -- The Passing of Capovilla Cardinal Loris Capovilla Passes Away At The Age Of 100 "There was a second envelope." —The late Cardinal Loris Capovilla, speaking to me in his residence in Sotto il Monte in early 2007, when I asked him why the letter of the Third Secret of Fatima held [...]
May 26, 2016, Thursday -- Cardinal Sarah's Remarkable Talk Last Week in Washington Cardinal Sarah Issues a Powerful Warning... "The battle to preserve the roots of mankind is perhaps the greatest challenge our world has faced since its origins." —Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Holy See's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the [...]
May 16, 2016, Monday -- The Three Positions (And Now Four) On Amoris Laetitia The text below is the Editorial in the May edition of Inside the Vatican, which is just out. (To obtain a copy of the issue or to subscribe for one or more years, click here. We welcome new subscribers, of course. If [...]
May 13, 2016, Friday -- In the Footsteps of Pope Benedict XVI... Blessed Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima... "In terms of what we today can discover in this message [the message of Fatima], attacks against the Pope or the Church don't come just from outside the Church. The suffering of the Church also comes [...]
APRIL FRIDAY 1 Pope Francis Sends Vestments, Financial Aid to Iraqi Christians Bishop Francesco Cavina As a sign of affection and closeness, Pope Francis has decided to send vestments used in the liturgy and a financial donation to Christian refugees in Erbil through the Catholic pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need. “Mercy [...]
Pope Francis at the Synod on the Family The “received wisdom” is that the Pope’s document is about Communion for the divorced and remarried, but is it really so? You could be forgiven for having decided that Amoris Laetitia is a failed document. If you accept, as it seems to be the received wisdom [...]
…but not for those who want to “circumvent Church teaching” As I started to sift through the coverage of Amoris Laetitia, it became apparent that some selective reading and reporting had taken place, even in direct opposition to the Pope’s specific guideline: “[I]f someone flaunts an objective sin as if it were part of the Christian [...]
Reading Amoris Laetitia: The Structure and Meaning of the Post-Synod Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis The exhortation incorporates from the synodal document the path of discernment of individual cases without putting limits on integration, as appeared in the past. It declares, moreover, that it cannot be denied that in some circumstances “imputability and responsibility for an [...]
U.S. Cardinal Raymond L. Burke stands with his crosier as he celebrates a Mass of thanksgiving at the Pontifical North American College in Rome November 22 (CNS photo/Alessia Giuliani, Catholic Press Photo) Cardinal Burke says a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, by its very nature, does not propose new doctrine and discipline, but applies the perennial [...]
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has said that Pope Francis’ summary document of the synods on the family, Amoris Laetitia, does not change the Church’s teaching but represents a development of doctrine, in continuity with previous Popes and the Church’s magisterium. Asked by Aleteia at today’s press conference whether the entirety of John Paul II’s teaching on the [...]
