Pope Francis is urging the bishops gathered for the Vatican Synod on the Family not to give in to “conspiracy” theories, after 13 cardinals and bishops expressed their concern that the assembly is being manipulated in a progressive direction.
Saddique Azam, a Catholic teacher who was recently appointed principal of a primary school in a small village of Pakistan, was severely beaten and tortured by three Islamist extremist teachers who said they refused to work under a Christian.
The United States was founded on the notion that each life is valuable, Fiorina said, which means “we have to confront our adversaries.” While it doesn’t mean rushing to war every time, she said, “we can’t lie down while evil is perpetuated all over the world.”
In a word intended to reassure conservatives, Pope Francis told the bishops gathered in the Vatican Synod on the family Tuesday that Church teaching on marriage is “still valid,” while also urging them to broaden their horizons, instead of focusing on internal questions such as Communion for the divorced and remarried.
An American archbishop who served as Vatican nuncio to Ukraine until several weeks ago warned that the country is in dire straits and risks becoming “a kind of Somalia in the middle of Europe.”
More than 130 notable converts to Catholicism have published an open letter begging Pope Francis and the bishops gathered at the Vatican Synod on Marriage and the Family to stand firm in teaching traditional Christian beliefs regarding the permanence of marriage, human sexuality, and the meaning of the family.
Msgr. Kryzstof Charamsa simultaneously released a “manifesto of liberation,” consisting of a list of ten “demands,” in which he insists that the Catholic Church change its teaching on the morality of gay sex as well as its interpretation of the Bible as condemning sodomy.
In his opening address to bishops gathered in Rome for the Vatican synod on marriage and the family, Pope Francis reminded them that the Synod is not a “Parliament” where participants argue their case or negotiate, but a gathering of believers attentive to the Holy Spirit.
Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) militants have destroyed three ancient arches in the city of Palmyra, Syria, in the latest stage of their campaign to demolish important historic monuments across the territories of Iraq and Syria.
The Pope said that Christian marriage is a cure for much of the solitude experienced by men and women in our own day. Our world, he said is characterized by loneliness and paradoxes. Today we enjoy “many sophisticated means of entertainment, but a deep and growing interior emptiness; many pleasures, but few loves; many liberties, but little freedom.” People need the family, even if they don’t realize it, Francis said.
Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a 43-year-old Polish priest working at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has been fired from his post, after coming out publically as an active homosexual Saturday.
How President Obama and countless other politicians and pundits can fail to grasp—or be unwilling to confront—the obvious connection between the breakdown of American family life and a rise in violent crime is a mystery deserving examination. The 26-year-old shooter Chris Harper Mercer was the umpteenth example of a fatherless boy who grows up to be a violent criminal.
On the eve of the Vatican synod on marriage and the family, progressive German Cardinal Walter Kasper has come out publicly against doctrinal “fundamentalism” in the Church, while expressing his hope that the synod will open a “dialogue” on contraception for Catholics and reconsider the situation of homosexuals.
In a scalding reproach to abortion giant Planned Parenthood, Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted has denounced its “barbaric practice of selling baby body parts,” calling for its immediate defunding.
Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmsted is urging the Catholic men of his diocese to man up and do battle with forces of evil that are “killing the remaining Christian ethos in our society and culture, and even in our own homes.”
With Wednesday’s expiration of the Congressional mandate for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), the American Catholic bishops have formally petitioned Congress to reinstate it.
When speaking of Europe’s migrant crisis, the Pope has often pointed to the need to address the conditions in migrants’ countries of origin, suggesting that the best long-term cure for the crisis is to stem the flow of those leaving their countries.
To many observers, it may seem strange that the Vatican would choose to keep a secret of what has been called “the most significant meeting” of the Pope’s entire trip to the United States: his 15-minute encounter with Kentucky County Clerk,
Bill Nye Defends Planned Parenthood, Says Pro-Life People Are ‘Ignorant’
Pope Francis says that he had wanted to remind U.S. leaders “that the greatest wealth of the country and its people are its spiritual and ethical heritage,” built on the founding principle “that all men are created equal by God and endowed with inalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards testifies before Congress — under oath — that she never said that her organization provided mammograms to women. But that’s a stark contradiction to what she actually said in a 2011 interview with Joy Behar on CNN.
In the lead-up to October’s Vatican Synod on Marriage and the Family, the drafters express their deep concern over what they see as “widespread confusion” over the possibility of divorced and remarried Catholics receiving Holy Communion as well as the acceptance of homosexual unions, which they describe as “contrary to Divine and natural law.” On Tuesday morning, the petition was delivered to the Vatican, requesting that Francis offer “a clarifying word” to dispel the confusion that reigns among many of the faithful around the globe.
“You know what happens to all walls,” Francis said. “All of them. All walls fall. Today, tomorrow or in 100 years, they will fall. This is not a solution. The wall isn’t a solution. At this moment, Europe is in trouble, it’s true. We have to be intelligent because a whole wave of migrants is arriving and it isn’t easy to find solutions. But with dialogue among different nations they will find them.”
He said the trip was “beautiful” and summed up the welcome he received in the three cities of his tour by saying that in Washington the welcome was “warm but more formal”; in New York the people were “exuberant” and in Philadelphia they were “very expressive.” The Pope also said he was “very struck” by the kindness of the people and by their “piety and religiosity,” evidenced during the religious ceremonies.
When asked about religious liberty aboard the papal plane during his return trip from the United States to Rome, Francis said that “conscientious objection is a right” and “if someone does not allow others to object on the basis of conscience, he denies a right.”
