The Catholic journalist Edward Pentin has an important interview with Father John Lavers, a Catholic priest who has some powerful insights into the McCarrick Report. First, some background: He led a 2012 investigation into allegations of homosexual behavior and activity at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut that led to the removal of 13 seminarians, primarily … Read more
I’m trying to describe my experience in the seminary, dejection at the state of the Church, and my latest decision to try to leave. There is something good in these developments, but I don’t know how to express it best. Here’s what I wrote: In the Church, truth and falsehood, good and evil have been … Read more
A statue outside St. Joseph Catholic Cathedral in Baton Rouge, Louisiana was found desecrated this past Thursday morning. Vandals had broken the fingers off the statue and marked it with offensive language. This marks the 84th attack on Catholic churches and symbols in North America in 2020. Read more at The American Conservative TAKE … Read more
Anybody who knows much of anything about the US Catholic Church and the abuse scandal knows that former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was at the center of much of it. But until now, to my knowledge, no one has mapped his web of influence within the Catholic hierarchy. Well, here is something truly useful for the … Read more
About a month ago, I posted about a blockbuster Church Militant story on sexual abuse scandal within the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, in particular in the town of St. Marys, Kansas, where the SSPX has a school and a big community. Church Militant kept writing about it (read all its coverage here), and … Read more
A distressed Catholic reader sends in this clip of the Vatican’s Christmas pop concert, a fundraiser of some sort, which featured a moment on stage in which an indigenous young woman from Latin America taught the audience to embrace the presence of Pachamama (Mother Earth) within. This, in the presence of bishops and cardinals, some … Read more
Cardinal Angelo Sodano has resigned, at 92, as Dean of the College of Cardinals. Excerpt: Pope Francis used the occasion to express “my gratitude, including in the name of the members of the College of Cardinals, for the precious and punctual service he [Cardinal Sodano] has offered as dean for many years with availability, dedication, … Read more
A friend — a conservative Evangelical — brought this to my attention earlier tonight. He texted (I quote this with his permission): You know, I have never believed that the claims of the Church of Rome were true, but I have always taken a certain comfort in the belief that Rome would hold firm to … Read more
I don’t believe that the main reason that Christianity is collapsing in America is because of church scandals. It has much more to do with broader and deeper trends in modernity — with science, with capitalism, with technology, with the Sexual Revolution. But the churches have hurt themselves tremendously with their sex scandals. A Protestant … Read more
A couple of months ago, I returned to my Bratislava hotel room from one of the most spiritually uplifting days of my life. I started it by visiting a secret room where faithful Catholics risked imprisonment by the communists for producing samizdat prayer books and literature. I ended it in the apartment of a saintly bishop (now … Read more