De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

In December 2013, Pope Francis sparked hope that the Catholic Church was taking the scandal of clerical sexual abuse seriously as he created a group to advise him and future popes on how the church worldwide could protect children, appointing experts on the issue and even survivors of abuse to a new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors . Four years later that commission has lapsed into an inactive state. Its members' terms of office, as set by the group's Vatican-approved statutes, expired last December (2017). Neither the pope nor the Vatican have made known when or if the current members will be reappointed or new members found. That Francis has allowed this lapse to occur has been broadly criticised from all quarters of the Catholic Church as deeply troubling. A commission without validly appointed members ceases to be a commission; its members may carry on their work but if they do, they do so as individuals without legal standing or vested authority ...

Bishop Juan Barros Madrid, centre, during a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, far right, on Thursday near Iquique, Chile. The Pope said there was "not one single piece of evidence" that Bishop Barros had protected a peadophile priest. Credit Vincenzo Pinto/Agence France Presse - Getty Images The papal plane stunt provided a great smoke-screen from the Pope awarding a extremist lgbt / pro-abortion politician a Knighthood in the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great  (although this was pretty well hidden among a plethora of awful ecclesial developments over the last week as I noted  in this post ). But there was another, much bigger issue which this PR stunt was perhaps designed to cover up, as Robert Mickens (not the most traddy journalist on the planet) points out in this La Croix article: Pope Francis has been away in South America this past week and, while in Chile, he drew only modest crowds of supporters. It was the frostiest recept...

Fr. Longnecker has posted this review of Pope Francis’ speech at Chile’s pontifical university. It shows just how polarised things are between (in my opinion) those of us who are faithful to the Church and honest about the present situation and those who are sycophants with an agenda. What agenda? Well, some clearly want to change the Church; modernise it. Faggioli belongs to the Bologna School. He literally believes Vatican II was a second Pentecost, that subsequently founded a new religion pic.twitter.com/9AM5d5yw6z — Catholic Sat (@CatholicSat) July 28, 2017 Some have invested so much time and effort into refuting criticisms of this papacy, to show any crack of acknowledgement at this stage would constitute a totally collapse in credibility: Pope cathedral speech a fine example of a spiritual master leading a Church prone to temptations in desolation. #FranciscoEnChile — Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) January 16, 2018 It is Austen Ivereigh who draws Fr. Longnecker...