De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

So Pope Francis has has declared Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna to be the "authoritative interpreter" of ' Amoris Laetitia, '. Speaking in Ireland at the weekend, Schönborn revealed that when he met the Pope shortly after the presentation of Amoris , Francis thanked him, and asked him if the document was orthodox. “I said, ‘Holy Father, it is fully orthodox’,” Schönborn told us he told the pope, adding that a few days later he received from Francis a little note that said: “Thank you for that word. That gave me comfort.” Talk about the blind leading the blind! The pope, after the publication of a document which the CDF lodged a large number of corrections of before its publication “ not one of the corrections was accepted .”, then considers that a nod from one of his yes men is sufficient to guarantee orthodoxy. It makes you wonder if Pope Francis even read the document himself (let alone wrote it) given that he explicitly stated himself that he co...

As a dear priest said to me very recently, it's always the way in the Church- or so it seems- that it is those who espouse a liberal attitude who are the most virulent and need their Storm Troopers to enforce their will on the faithful, while so called "Trads" like Benedict XVI just quietly get on with the work of deepening & explaining the faith by example. I often think how hurtful it must have been to have Bugnini's dreadful modernisms foisted on the post concilliar Church - the stories I have heard are just dreadful. But while those who have never been particularly concerned with following the teachings of Christ praise Pope Francis for his daring attempt to engage with the world, the true casualty of this dreadful papacy will be the credibility of Catholic teaching. For what authority has any organisation which teaches hard truths about human realities like marriage, for a thousand years or so, if it can then dispose of them in a single, verbose and del...

Fr. Tony Flannery, the self-styled 'nice-guy who has been badly treated by the meanies in Rome', has been demonstrably shown to be a liar as well as a heretic. Renegade Redemptorist Flannery was one of a handful of priests who hit the headlines last year after being disciplined by Rome; Brian Darcy, whose ‘silencing’ was clearly nothing of the sort , was perhaps the most infamous of this batch, but Tony Flannery, as one of the founders and leaders of the Association of Catholic Priests, may be even more important, as The Thirsty Gargoyle detailed in January . Now, in a wide-ranging interview with the Irish Catholic, Cardinal Lavada, former prefect of the Vatican’s CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) dismisses Flannery's claims that he was shouted down about married priests and conscience, and cites Flannery's blatant and published heresy as the reason the CDF were forced to intervene. Flannery is well documented to hold positions completely a...

This is really fascinating and well worth watching. A decade ago, and just two years before he became Pope, EWTN's Raymond Arroyo interviewed the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had been Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for 22 years. The CDF, previously known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition (wherefrom arose the names Roman Inquisition or Holy Inquisition popularly used in reference to the 16th century tribunals against witchcraft and heresy), and after 1904 called the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, is the oldest of the nine congregations of the Roman Curia. Among the most active of the congregations, it oversees Catholic Church doctrine. Its offices are housed at the Palace of the Holy Office at the Vatican. What we see here is Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope, speaking about liturgy, about his vision for the future, about the sex abuse scandal, about the Papacy of John Paul II, and abou...