De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

Pope Francis has decried abortion and euthanasia, saying that today’s “throwaway culture” leads to the killing of children and discarding of the elderly. Which is awesome.  Giving a speech on Monday in which he said that today’s “throwaway culture” leads to the killing of children and discarding of the elderly, the Pope strongly defended Catholic teaching on the fundamental and essential dignity of every human person from conception to natural death: “There is the discarding of children that we do not want to welcome with the law of abortion that sends them to the dispatcher and kills them directly. And today this has become a ‘normal’ method, a practice that is very ugly. It is really murder,” The speech marked the second time this month that Pope Francis has spoken out strongly about abortion. During a press conference on his return flight from Slovakia on Sept. 15, the pope repeatedly said that “abortion is murder” and compared the acceptance of abortion to “accepting daily m...

  Writing in The Catholic Thing , Stephen P. White makes some great points regarding the recent exposé by The Pillar . I found his observations on the reaction of both the Vatican & the USCCB particularly interesting: "The Pillar analysis of mobile app data revealed some very unpleasant things. Rather than simply publishing the findings, The Pillar notified the relevant Church authorities and gave them a reasonable chance to formulate a constructive response, granting additional time when requested. Either the USCCB or the Secretariat of State (or both) clearly didn’t like what The Pillarhad to tell them. The response was to stall, leak parts of the story to other sympathetic news outlets, and then stonewall. I’ll leave it to communications directors and journalists to argue over whether this maneuvering was brilliant or slimy. What is clear is that this maneuver was meant to be punitive, to intimidate. This strategy was not to stop the story coming out – word of the story w...