Catholic Church

Germany: Bavaria can hang crosses in state buildings

Crosses mounted in the entrances of the state’s administrative buildings in Bavaria can stay up, Germany’s highest court for most administrative law disputes ruled on Tuesday.

In 2018, Bavarian state premier Markus Söder of the Christian Social Union (CSU) ordered that all public buildings prominently hang a cross “as an expression of Bavaria’s historical and cultural character.”

A Bavarian lobby group advocating “the meaningful separation of church and state as well as the eradication of church privileges,” whose German name might roughly translate to the Association for Free Thinking for Bavaria (bfg Bayern), challenged the decree in court.

During WW II in Bavaria attempts were made to remove crosses from public buildings by local Nazis.

Soldiers returning from the front on leave were recruited by local Catholics to re-install the crosses in very public displays.

One instance saw a pitchfork wielding mob threaten a local Nazi Bigwig unless he returned the crosses he had hidden. His wife spilled the beans fearing her Nazi hubby would meet a horrible end.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, Germany

Pope approves blessings for same-sex couples if they don’t resemble marriage

ROME (AP) — Pope Francis has formally approved allowing priests to bless same-sex couples, with a new document explaining a radical change in Vatican policy by insisting that people seeking God’s love and mercy shouldn’t be subject to “an exhaustive moral analysis” to receive it.

The document from the Vatican’s doctrine office, released Monday, elaborates on a letter Francis sent to two conservative cardinals that was published in October. In that preliminary response, Francis suggested such blessings could be offered under some circumstances if they didn’t confuse the ritual with the sacrament of marriage.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church

Pope Francis fires Texan bishop after criticism of reforms

Pope Francis has fired the Texan bishop Joseph Strickland, a fierce critic who has questioned the Pope’s leadership of the Catholic church.

The Vatican said the bishop would be “relieved” of his duties as a result of investigations at his Diocese of Tyler.

Bishop Strickland is a leading voice in a branch of US Catholicism that is opposed to the Pope’s reforms.

His removal comes after Francis spoke of the “backwardness” of some US Catholic church leaders.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church

Debunking the Myth of ‘Hitler’s Pope’

Recently released evidence shows Pope Pius XII acted to prevent the slaughter of Jews.

Wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII has long been accused of failing to act in the face of Nazi atrocities, giving rise to the myth of “Hitler’s Pope.” But Vatican officials are working hard to debunk that myth and to share with the world the heroism, compassion, and cunning evinced by Pius XII in the face of one of the most horrific periods of world history. The Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome hosted a conference last week to reveal and discuss newly-declassified documents from the Vatican archive, detailing Pope Pius XII’s efforts to confront Nazi Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler and protect Jews from concentration camps. Vatican Secretariat of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin presided over the conference, who condemned what he called “cases of scientific dishonesty which become ‘historical manipulation’ when documents are negligently or deliberately concealed.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, Holocaust

The FBI and ‘Radical’ Catholics

New evidence suggests the bureau probe was wider than director Christopher Wray said.

Remember the tempest this year when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was found to be targeting some Catholics as “extremists?” The bureau cast it as the work of a single rogue field office. Well, it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public.

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, FBI, USA, WTF?

Pope Appoints Extreme Leftist to Doctrine Office

“By far the worst personnel decision in Francis’s ponticate.”

Pope Francis has once again caused controversy with his new pick to lead the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s investigative and doctrinal office. The Vatican officially announced that Argentine Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández would be the new head of the DDF, a role previously held by the likes of Pope St. Pius V and, in more recent times, cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Joseph Ratzinger. The announcement has caused a significant stir for numerous reasons, but chief among them are Fernández’s heterodox views, lack of experience, and personality.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church

German Catholic church ‘dying painful death’ as 520,000 leave in a year

The Catholic church in Germany has revealed it is losing followers like never before, with more than half a million people deciding to renounce their membership last year.

According to the Bonn-based German Bishops’ Conference, 522,821 people left the church in 2022, a number far surpassing predictions made by the institution itself and higher than most observers had expected. The previous record year for departures was in 2021, when just under 360,000 people left.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, Germany

U.S. Catholic Bishops Supporting Illegal Immigration?

Getting rich off the poor.

As the immense human tragedy at the nation’s southern border unfolds, an organization claiming to fight for the vulnerable remains breathtakingly silent.

That organization, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, vigorously fought President Donald Trump’s efforts to build a wall to curtail the trafficking in human lives — especially children — and drugs that accompany the kind of open borders Pope Francis advocates. But since Joe Biden became America’s virtual president, and especially since Title 42 expired, the bishops’ public opposition to federal policy evaporated.

Why the glaring reversal?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Mass Immigration - Follow the money", Catholic Church

Penitential rite held after naked man stands on St. Peter’s Basilica’s main altar

Two days after a naked man stood on the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica in a shocking security breach, the basilica’s archpriest on Saturday held a penitential rite as required by canon law in cases where sacred places are desecrated.

Vatican News reported that the unidentified man was a Polish national who approached the high altar on June 1 as the basilica was about to close. He quickly undressed and climbed onto the altar. Photos posted online showed the words “Save children of Ukraine” written in marker on his back.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church

Nun in line for sainthood as exhumed body shows no sign of decay after four years

A nun has moved one step closer to sainthood after her exhumed body showed no signs of decay, four years after it was buried.

Pilgrims are now flocking to Missouri to see the impeccably well-preserved body of Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster.

Sister Wilhelmina, the founder of the Benedictine Sisters of Mary, Queen of the Apostles, in Gower, Missouri, died at age 95 in May 2019.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church

It’s unfair, humiliating if only the rich can build a family, pope says

Socially as well as economically, “starting a family has turned into a titanic effort, instead of being a shared value that everyone recognizes and supports,” Pope Francis told a conference in Rome.

ROME (CNS) — Starting a family and having children has become a kind of herculean task when instead it should be valued and supported by everyone, Pope Francis said at a meeting in Rome on Italy’s severe decline in population growth.

Today’s culture “is unfriendly, if not hostile, to the family, centered as it is on the needs of the individual, where individual rights are continually claimed and the rights of the family are not discussed,” the pope said at the meeting May 12.

Women face “almost insurmountable constraints,” he said, especially as they are often forced to choose between having a career and being a mother or caring for family members who are frail or need special care.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, Demography

Report: Anti-Catholic Hate Crimes Have Nearly Tripled In Canada

Canada, not unlike much of the United States, was a very different place just a short time ago. Most Canadians used to believe in basic civil liberties. They could watch hockey games without being lectured about radical gender theory by teams donning pride-themed jerseys. Denouncing people for the color of their skin was seen as vicious, not virtuous.

But perhaps the most troubling of all changes to occur in recent years is the country’s open and growing hostility toward Christianity and, in particular, the Catholic faith.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Catholic Church, Christian Persecution

The great papal cover-up

As readers of this esteemed publication would be aware, in 2018, the Vatican signed a provisional agreement with the Chinese Communist Party on the appointment of Catholic bishops. In doing so, the Vatican recognised the Chinese ‘Patriotic Church’, set up and controlled by the CCP.

Indeed, the late Cardinal Pell, in the ‘Demos’ document attributed to him, stated that under the 2018 secret Vatican-China pact, there had been ‘no public support for the loyal Catholics in China who have been intermittently persecuted for their loyalty to the Papacy for more than 70 years’.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"China - Communist Slave State", Catholic Church

Ireland’s Failing Faith

Once again, the higher clergy abandons its responsibilities.

As I touched down in Ireland the morning of Easter Sunday, I was saddened to think how sparse the Catholic faith — and with it, conservatism — has become in that once-proud bastion of sainthood. Still sometimes called “the land of saints and scholars,” Ireland has become in recent years a hotbed of moral degeneracy and political leftism, fueled by anti-Catholicism and resisted by precious few of those who cling to the faith that St. Patrick preached so many ages ago.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, Ireland

An FBI informant inside the Catholic Church, to keep tabs on all those Latin Mass aficionados?

When news broke a few weeks ago about the FBI targeting the Catholic Church’s Latin Mass enthusiasts as part of the great Joe Biden hunt for “extremists,” outrage ensued, and the bureau moved quickly to dismiss the matter as the doing of an errant field office, which put out a bum policy paper. It certainly wasn’t the FBI’s policy to target Americans for their beliefs, FBI director Christopher Wray testified, adding that the miscreants in the Richmond local field office would be given refresher courses to put them back on the straight and narrow. Never mind that they’d committed a violation of the First Amendment rights of American citizens under the Constitution. The refresher courses would fix everything.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCatholic Church, FBI, USA, WTF?