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Bishop Joseph Strickland
Thank God for Cardinal Müller’s strength and fidelity to Christ and His teaching.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider
A necessary and a very timely initiative, edifying the Faith and bringing light in the enormous spiritual confusion.
Pew Research: Only One-Third of Catholics Believe in Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist
If you ask any Catholic theologian what the most important part of Christian life is, they’ll tell you the Eucharist.
Which is why the U.S. bishops must feel like they have been double punched by new data from the Pew Research Center.
On July 23, the prestigious polling firm released a new report – “What Americans Know About Religion” – that found that half of Catholics in the United States don’t know the Catholic Church teaches the Eucharist is the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
Most of the other half thought the Church taught the Eucharist was just a symbol of Christ’s body, although 4 percent said they were unsure what the Church taught.
That was the first punch.
This week, Pew delivered the second – it reported that only one-third of Catholics believe that the Eucharist is the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t take a math degree to figure out what that means, although Pew does helpfully fill in the blanks: “One-in-five Catholics (22 percent) reject the idea of transubstantiation [the technical term for the bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ], even though they know about the Church’s teaching.”
George Weigel: The Vandals Sack Rome….Again
An exercise in raw intellectual vandalism has been underway in Rome since July 23: what was originally known as the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family has been peremptorily but systematically stripped of its most distinguished faculty, and its core courses in fundamental moral theology have been cancelled. Concurrently, academics known to be opposed to the teaching of Humanae Vitae on the appropriate means of regulating fertility and the teaching of Veritatis Splendor on intrinsically evil acts are being appointed to teach at the reconfigured Institute, which is housed at the Pontifical Lateran University – the pope’s own institution of higher learning. Sixteen hundred nine years after the first Vandal sack of Rime, they’re at it again, although this time the chief vandal wears an archbishop’s zucchetto.
Cardinal Brandmüller: Synod Doc is ‘Attack on the Foundations of the Faith’
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has firmly criticized the working document of the upcoming Amazonian Synod, saying “decisive points” are “heretical” and that it constitutes an “attack on the foundations of the faith.”
In a June 27 commentary the president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences also said the document “burdens” the Synod of Bishops with a “grave breach” of the deposit of faith which he believes will either result in the Church’s “self-destruction,” or reduce her to a “secular NGO with an ecological-social-psychological mandate.”
The German cardinal began his critique, published jointly at LifeSiteNews and Kathnet, by calling it “truly astonishing” that the synod, which takes place in Rome Oct. 6-27, deals exclusively with a region whose population is “just half that of Mexico City.”
He added this leads to “suspicion concerning the true intentions” of the synod, “which are to be implemented in a clandestine fashion.” He also questioned the “understanding of religion, of Christianity, and of the Church” given the basis of the working document, called an instrumentum laboris, published June 17.
‘Declaration of Truths’ Seeks to Affirms Key Church Teachings
Cardinal Raymond Burke and Bishop Athanasius Schneider are among a small group of cardinals and bishops to sign a “declaration of truths” reaffirming key Church teachings at a time they describe as “almost universal doctrinal confusion and disorientation.”
Published on June 10, Pentecost Monday, and entitled “Declaration of the Truths Relating to Some of the Most Common Errors in the Life of the Church of Our Time,” the eight-page document reaffirms the Church’s perennial teaching on a range of key doctrines, from the Eucharist and marriage, to capital punishment and clerical celibacy.
The document is the latest in a series of declarations, filial petitions and corrections from bishops, academics, priests and laity concerned about the ambiguity of teaching and associated confusion that have arisen during the current pontificate.
In an explanatory note, the signatories state the declaration, dated May 31, has been written “in the spirit of fraternal charity” and as a “concrete spiritual help” so that clergy, religious and laity are able to confess “those truths that in our days are mostly denied or disfigured.”
Cardinal Caffarra Begged Pope Francis To End Confusion in Church Prior To His Death
A few months before he died, Cardinal Carlo Caffarra begged Pope Francis in a letter made public in June to end the “confusion and disorientation” within the Church after the publication of the Pope’s April 2016 Exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
But Pope Francis never answered the Cardinal’s April 25 plea, just as he never answered the September 19, 2016 plea of Caffarra along with three other cardinals to confirm that his Exhortation conformed to perennial Catholic teaching.
Cardinal Burke: Disorientation and Error have Entered into the Church ‘In a Diabolical Way’
“Confusion, division, and error” within the Catholic Church coming from “shepherds” even at the highest levels indicate that we “may be” in the end times, said U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke in an address in Kentucky.
The Cardinal, who spoke at the July 22 “Church Teaches Forum” in Louisville, said that, in his opinion, the times “realistically seem to be apocalyptic.”
“We are living in most troubled times in the world and also in the Church,” he said. “In such a pervasively disordered cultural condition, there is legitimate fear of a global confrontation which can only mean destruction and death for many,” he added. “Clearly, the present situation of the world cannot continue without leading to total annihilation.”
Burke, one of the Church’s leading canon law experts, outlined how evils now commonly accepted in the West’s “ravaged” culture have now managed to infiltrate the Church, passing from the shepherds to the sheep.
Cardinal Caffarra: ‘Only a Blind Man’ Could Deny Confusion in the Church
One of four cardinals who recently asked Pope Francis to clarify his position on Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics said Saturday they acted because “only a blind man could deny there’s great confusion, uncertainty and insecurity in the Church.”
“It’s caused by some paragraphs in Amoris Laetitia,” said Italian Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, the retired archbishop of Bologna, referring to a document released by Pope Francis in April 2016 drawing conclusions from two contentious Synods of Bishops on the family.
“In recent months, on some very fundamental questions regarding the sacraments, such as marriage, confession and the Eucharist, and the Christian life in general, some bishops have said A, and others the contrary of A,” Caffarra said.
