Tag: Catholic Church

As rumors swirl about the Pope retiring, Pope Francis names new cardinals.

– August 26, 2022

Pope Francis, who recently raised the possibility of retiring due to his declining health, will create 20 new cardinals on Saturday — many of whom could one day choose his successor.

It is the eighth consistory since the 85-year-old was elected in 2013, but is being particularly closely watched for signs of the kind of Catholic Church he hopes to leave behind.

The new cardinals include men known for their progressive views and their pastoral work, and they hail from around the world: from Brazil to Nigeria, India, Singapore, and East Timor. After Saturday’s swearing-in at St Peter’s Basilica, they will join a two-day meeting of all cardinals starting Monday.

The gathering was called earlier this year to discuss the pope’s new constitution for the governance of the church — but has only fuelled speculation he is on his way out.

Francis, who has canceled numerous events in recent months and been forced to use a wheelchair due to knee pain, said last month that “the door is open” to stepping down.

If he did follow his predecessor Benedict XVI and resign, a conclave involving all cardinals aged under 80 would be called to choose a successor. After this weekend, Francis will have chosen around 90 out of the 132 cardinals eligible to elect a new pope, around two-thirds of the total — precisely the percentage needed for any proposed name to pass.

The naming of cardinals, normally an annual event, is always scrutinized as an indication of the future direction of the Catholic Church and its priorities for its 1.3 billion faithful.

But Francis’s choices for cardinals do not automatically guarantee that the next pope would be someone reflecting his own priorities, Vatican specialist Bernard Lecomte told AFP.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

Pope Francis Is Preparing a Radical Reform of the Church’s Power Structures

Claire Giangravé – September 3, 2021

VATICAN CITY (RNS) — In 2001, Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was a rapporteur for the summit of bishops at the Vatican — and he did not like what he saw.

The Catholic Church had adopted a top-to-bottom approach that stripped local churches of any decision-making power, and the synod of bishops was reduced to nothing more than a stamp of approval for prepackaged conclusions made in Rome.

When Bergoglio emerged as Pope Francis in the 2013 conclave, the synodal process was high on his list for reform.

“There was a cardinal who told us what should be discussed and what should not,” Francis said about his experience at the 2001General Synod in an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nation in 2014. “That will not happen now,” he added.

On Oct. 9 and 10, Pope Francis will inaugurate a three-year preparation process for the 2023 Synod, which will focus on reforming the synodal process. The preparation process and the 2023 Synod, with the theme “For a Synodal Church: communion, participation and mission,” have the potential to revolutionize the way decisions are made in the Catholic Church and promote a more decentralized structure of authority.

“If people just think about this as a meeting on meetings, they are so missing the point,” said the Rev. David McCallum, executive director of the Program for Discerning Leadership of the Gregorian University in Rome and a member of the Synod Commission on Methodology, in an interview with Religion News Service.

The three-year synodal review process will take place in three phases: a local phase at the diocesan and parish level, a continental phase engaging bishops’ conferences around the world and a universal phase, when bishops and lay people will convene in Rome to discuss the findings and topics developed in the first two phases. To coordinate and guide the entire process, Pope Francis created a five-member steering committee flanked by two commissions on methodology and theology.

The hierarchical structure Pope Francis eschewed at the Vatican in 2001 is currently reflected in Catholic dioceses around the globe. Throughout history “it became very natural that bishops, who were often the most educated and prepared leaders in the particular region where the church was, exercised their leadership as a mayor would,” McCallum explained.

https://www.christianheadlines.com

Suffer the Little Children

Joseph Hippolito – June 2, 2021

For centuries, the Catholic Church represented unmitigated opposition to abortion. But as recent events seem to indicate, Pope Francis is preparing to sacrifice that historic position — and those it protects — on the altar of his globalist agenda.

On May 7, Cardinal Luis Ladaria issued a letter from the Vatican discouraging American bishops from preventing elected officials who support abortion to receive Communion. Only the pope himself ranks higher as a theological authority than Ladaria, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ladaria released the letter after several bishops publicly said Joe Biden, the virtual president who supports abortion, should not receive Communion. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone even wrote a forceful pastoral letter on the subject, without mentioning Biden. But other bishops, such as Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, D.C., said they would welcome Biden at Communion.

A church-going Catholic, Biden was denied Communion by a priest in Charleston, S.C. while campaigning in that state in 2019. Since replacing President Donald Trump, Biden has used legislation and executive action to give abortion providers nearly $500 billion from taxpayers.

At that pace, Biden will have provided more federal funding for abortion than any President in American history.

The Catholic catechism describes abortion a “moral evil,” quotes a pastoral document in calling it and infanticide “abominable crimes,” and demands excommunication for anyone involved in “formal cooperation.” Catholic canon law also states that Catholics “persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion,” and that Catholics who “are conscious of grave sin” must not receive Communion “without previous sacramental confession.”

If giving $500 billion to abortion providers fails to constitute “formal cooperation” with a “moral evil,” then what does?

https://www.frontpagemag.com

Statues of Jesus being beheaded across the Country

ETH – July 17,2020

(ETH) – Another statue of Jesus has been beheaded by vandalizes in the courtyard of a Catholic church in Kendale Lakes, Florida, according to a report from the Miami Archdiocese who claim that it expects police to label the incident as a hate crime.

The statue of Jesus Christ that was beheaded had been resting behind the church for decades before and was allegedly decapitated by vandals overnight into Wednesday.  According to the report, authorities are yet unsure of who was behind the incident, RT News stated:

“This is not something you can trip over and say, ‘Oh, sorry,’ – Someone did this intentionally,” spokesperson Mary Ross Agosta told local media. Agosta said the church sees it as not merely an act of vandalism – which has been on the rise in the wake of the George Floyd protests, with activists toppling statues of historical figures across the country – but an “an attack on the church” that should be investigated as a “hate crime.” They also warned that the suspected hate-fueled attack on the statue is not an isolated incident and that the Catholic Church as a whole has faced an avalanche of similar attacks recently.

https://endtimeheadlines.org

The Roman Globalist Church

Joseph Hippolito – May 1, 2020

As Christians worldwide celebrated their most significant holiday, their most recognizable figure delivered a distinctly secular message.

On Easter Sunday, the Vatican released a letter Pope Francis wrote to Catholic organizations in South America. Francis wrote that the coronavirus pandemic “might be a good time to consider a universal basic wage” that would enable the poor to enjoy “the benefits of globalism.”

Such a measure, Francis wrote, “would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.”

Toward the end of his letter, Francis hoped the pandemic would generate “a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money, and places human life and dignity at the center.”

Nowhere in his letter did Francis mention Jesus Christ.

The letter conclusively proves that Francis is transforming the Catholic Church into another non-governmental organization. In the process, he is destroying the church’s identity and credibility.

Francis’ activism reflects and culminates the Vatican’s embrace of humanist utopianism, which Front Page Magazine briefly addressed last year in “They Died For ‘Dialogue’?” That article traced the Holy See’s policy of appeasing Islam and China to the radical globalism adopted at the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

A pastoral document written on politics and economics during the council stated that “there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter. … Hence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com