When I saw that Pope Francis would participate as a speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative this month, my heart sank.
Frankly, and I say this as a Catholic, former President Bill Clinton is one of the last people I would like Francis to prominently engage with.
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Pope Francis is set to make the first-ever visit to Mongolia, a country with fewer than 1,500 Catholics, all of whom have come to the faith since 1992. But the pope’s visit is a reminder that the country has a long and complex history with Christianity, among many other faiths.
Mongolia has only 3.4 million people, and at least 87.4% are Buddhists. The small Catholic community came into existence after this landlocked country, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south, began to abandon its communist ideology and embraced different religions. At that time, it also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican and welcomed Catholic missionaries.
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Pope Francis is warning about the possible adverse effects of artificial intelligence and the need to monitor the technology in his message for World Day of Peace.
The cautionary message came Tuesday when the Vatican released the theme of the pope’s message for World Day of Peace, which is Sept. 21.
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It’s a good time to be a coot, especially an old one. Old coots rule the roost (or more accurately, the nest) in the world’s most powerful and populous countries.
The leaders of the nine most populous countries in the world are today all led by men in their seventies and eighties. U.S. President Joe Biden is 80 years old as is the president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari. President Lula of Brazil is 77. Pakistan’s president Arif Alvi is 73 and its prime minister is 71. Narendra Modi of India is 72.
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The Vatican announced Wednesday during a press conference that women would be allowed to vote during the upcoming Synod of Bishops in October, according to The Associated Press.
Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the synod, and Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the synod, announced that Pope Francis had approved the proposed changes by the council overseeing the synod, according to American Magazine. Under the new rules, both women and laymen will be allowed to vote for the first time in the history of the practice, and five religious sisters will be appointed as representatives for different orders, according to the AP.
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In recent weeks, slanderous allegations have been made against Saint John Paul II.
On Divine Mercy Sunday, a day established by John Paul II, Pope Francis defended his predecessor saying, “Certain of interpreting the feelings of the faithful throughout the world, I direct a grateful thought to the memory of Saint John Paul II, the object of offensive and unfounded inferences these past few days.”
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Pope Francis says the Catholic Church’s celibacy decree for unmarried men ordained as priests is a “temporary prescription” that could be reconsidered.
“In the Western Church, celibacy is a temporary prescription,” Francis told the Argentinian outlet Infobae late last week, as translated. “I do not know if it is settled in one way or another.”
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Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega reportedly banned public church processions for Easter after comparing the Catholic church to the “mafia,” according to the Catholic News Agency (CNA).
Tensions between the government and the church have been rising due to Ortega orchestrating multiple investigations into church leaders and exiling others, according to CNA. Ortega has reportedly placed a ban on public religious demonstrations during Lent, Good Friday and Easter after he attacked the church during a speech memorializing the 89th anniversary of Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino’s death, calling the Catholic church a “mafia organization” committing “grave crimes and horrors.”
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Pope Francis criticized attempts on both the left and the right to politicize the church in his weekly address at the Vatican Wednesday, according to remarks released by the Vatican.
Francis has been known for taking a more liberal approach to the papacy on issues of same-sex marriage, divorce and capitalism compared to his predecessor Benedict. The Pope said during his General Audience on Ash Wednesday that the church should not be run by any ideology and instead should focus on the Holy Spirit’s guidance, according to the Vatican.
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Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is releasing a book that accuses Pope Francis of giving “privileged status” to his friends that are accused of sexual abuse in the church, according to Catholic news website LaCroix International. The Roman Catholic Church has suffered multiple sexual abuse scandals over the years after several reports from the Vatican found that the clergy, particularly in France, had abused thousands of victims. While Müller says that France’s Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE) 2021 report was “inflated and exaggerated,” the cardinal claims in his new book, “In Good Faith: Religion in the 21st Century,” that Francis has helped protect those close to him by granting them a special “status,” citing the case of Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was convicted in March 2022 of sexual abuse of two victims during seminary, as an example, according to LaCroix International.
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Pope Francis I said in an interview with the Associated Press that “homosexuality is not a crime” and encouraged bishops to stop practicing forms of conversion therapy. Francis has come under scrutiny in the past for his statements regarding the LGBTQ community, including his perceived endorsement of same-sex civil unions in 2020. The pope stated during the interview that while homosexuality is considered a sin, it should not be a “crime.”
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A couple of months ago I was in a fascinating conversation with a Catholic colleague regarding the papacies of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, here in the ninth year of this curious era, 2013-22, when the world was living with, in effect, two popes of sorts, a reigning pope named Francis and a resigned pope — a “Pope Emeritus” — named Benedict XVI. We were wondering if the latter would, ironically, ultimately outlive the former, who few expected to have a papacy this long. When Francis’ papacy started in 2013, he was already known for poor health, which has progressively gotten worse.
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Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who shaped Catholic doctrine for decades before surprising the church by resigning as pontiff, died Saturday at age 95, the Vatican announced.
“With sorrow I inform you that the Pope Emeritus, Benedict XVI, passed away today at 9:34 in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery in the Vatican,” Vatican press secretary Matteo Bruni told media.
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Pope Francis on Wednesday asked for prayers for his 95-year-old predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who the Vatican said is constantly receiving medical care.
At the end of his weekly general audience, Francis said in Italian: “I would like to ask all of you for a special prayer for Pope Emeritus Benedict, who, in silence, is sustaining the Church,” as translated by Reuters.
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Outspoken former papal ambassador to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò condemned the Holy See’s decision to laicize pro-life priest Father Frank Pavone, calling the action “unjust and illegitimate punishment,” and observed hypocrisy in the move while “the Roman Curia is infested with unpresentable characters who are notoriously corrupt and heretical sodomites and fornicators.”
“[A] person’s actions are consistent with who that person is, ”Viganò wrote at LifeSiteNews Thursday, and asserted that principle has been confirmed “in the canonical sanctions recently imposed by the Holy See on Father Frank A. Pavone, a well-known and appreciated pro-life priest, who for decades has been committed to the battle against the horrible crime of abortion.”
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There’s been a flurry of commentary in Catholic circles since Pope Francis decided to defrock pro-life advocate and priest Frank Pavone. One suggestion I’ve seen from many Catholic writers is that Francis is punishing Pavone because he believes clergymen should not be involved in politics. It’s a laughable argument. Francis is very frequently involved in politics and regularly encourages (leftist) priests in their activism.
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Prominent international pro-life leader Father Frank Pavone said Monday Pope Francis “definitely signed off” on a letter that reportedly states the Vatican has laicized Pavone, for “blasphemous communications on social media” and “persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop.”
“I have received nothing,” Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, told The Star News Network during a telephone interview Monday. “And what’s worse, that has been the pattern for the last 20 years of abuse by church authorities.”
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Catholics must “stay firm in the truth” as those who have embraced an LGBTQ agenda are in the midst of a “hostile takeover” of the Catholic Church, warned German Cardinal Gerhard Müller in interviews over the past week with both EWTN’s The World Over and LifeSiteNews.
Müller, the former head of the Vatican’s highest doctrinal office, is voicing his significant concerns about the dangers to the Church brought on during Pope Francis’ Synod on Synodality, a process that involves collecting the views of lay Catholics in every diocese around the world prior to the Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2023.
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As most Italians are enjoying the last days of summer, Pope Francis has called the College of Cardinals to the Vatican. From August 27-30, the Holy Father will preside over three consistories and a pastoral visit.
On August 27, Pope Francis will convene two consistories, on August 28, he will make a pastoral visit to L’Aquila, and on August 29 and 30, he will preside over a third consistory.
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In the past year, rumors have swirled in Rome that Pope Francis may soon retire, and in the past few days, those rumors have accelerated. The 85-year-old’s frail health is one reason for the speculation. In recent weeks, he has been confined to a wheelchair due to debilitating knee pain.
He also reportedly struggles to stand due to his sciatica. The “Woke Pope” recently cancelled a trip to Africa scheduled for next month due to his knee ailment, “raising questions about his ability to walk during the rest of his papacy,” according to Reuters.
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A former apostolic nuncio, or papal ambassador, to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has warned Catholics that several of the bishops Pope Francis has recently elevated to the College of Cardinals support leftwing causes and oppose the Church’s traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass.
“Pope Francis has chosen his new cardinals for their ‘corruptibility,’” the outspoken Viganò wrote at LifeSiteNews last week.
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The state of Michigan’s most recent budget includes robust protections for college students seeking exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.
House Bill 4400 — signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) on September 29 — requires that all universities receiving a state appropriation must ensure that students can receive religious and medical exemptions from the vaccine, provided that they obtain a letter from a physician or draft a statement articulating their religious beliefs.
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Members of France’s Catholic Church sexually abused 330,000 children over the past 70 years, according to a new report on abuses in the country’s Catholic Church.
The 2,500-page report is France’s first real documentation of the abuse, the Associated Press reported, and is based on research by France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
“The Catholic Church is the place where the prevalence of sexual violence is at its highest, other than in family and friend circles,” the report said, according to CNN.
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Pope Francis lamented news of plunging birth rates worldwide in a Friday address, warning that there is “no future” without the family.
“If the family is not at the center of the present, there will be no future; but if the family takes off again, everything will take again,” the pope tweeted Friday.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released in early May found that the provisional number of births in the United States in 2020 is down 4% from 2019. Women in the U.S. gave birth to approximately 3.61 million babies in 2020, compared to about 3.75 million births in 2019, and the United States total fertility rate fell to 1.64, the lowest rate since the government began tracking such data in the 1930s.
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The Catholic Church cannot bless gay unions since Catholic teaching holds that gay sex is “intrinsically disordered” and marriage is intended for the sake of creating new life, the Vatican re-emphasized Monday.
In a formal response issued Monday, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded to a question on whether Catholic clergy can bless gay unions with the answer: “Negative.”
The Vatican’s response noted that God “does not and cannot bless sin.”
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The former papal nuncio to the United States, now a retired archbishop, told Stephen K. Bannon that if Joseph R. Biden Jr., becomes the president Jan. 20, it is one more step in the linkage of the so-called Deep State, the Deep Church and the ultimate primacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
“It would be an irreparable disaster if Joe Biden, who is heavily suspected of being complicit with the Chinese dictatorship, would be designated as President of the United States,” said Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who from 2011 to 2016 served at the Holy See’s ambassador to the Washington, a role that also made him the principal liaison between the American bishops and the pope and the Vatican bureaucracy.
The archbishop said he was troubled by the power of the mainstream media to overwhelm legitimate questions about the 2020 presidential election.
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Pope Francis pledged Wednesday to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decadeslong church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dismissing mountains of evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct starting in the 1990s — but largely spared Francis. Instead, it laid the lion’s share of the blame on St. John Paul II, a former pope, for having appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in 2000, and making him a cardinal, despite having commissioned an inquiry that found he had slept with seminarians.
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Pope Francis endorsed same-sex civil unions for the first time as pontiff while being interviewed for the feature-length documentary “Francesco,” which premiered Wednesday at the Rome Film Festival.
The papal thumbs-up came midway through the film that delves into issues Francis cares about most, including the environment, poverty, migration, racial and income inequality, and the people most affected by discrimination.
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Pope Francis rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have allowed priests in remote areas to be married.
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Archbishop Bernard Hebda of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis publicly rebuked one of his priests for criticizing Islam during a recent homily.
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