Catholic Church

By Msgr. Charles Pope - You are going to die and you don’t get to say when or how. I say this at every funeral, both to those present and to myself. This solemn reminder is hard to process. It is one thing to assent to this obvious truth intellectually, but it is another thing to internalize it in our depths and really know what it means… What is death? Some speak of heartbeats that stop or brain waves that cease, but that is not what death is. The cessation of vital indicators is the effect of death, not death itself.

By Father Roger J. Landry, EWTN News - Family members and friends whom we know and love are no longer practicing or believing… At a personal level, however, they occupy a great deal of the minds and hearts of parents, grandparents, godparents, spouses, siblings, sons, daughters and friends, as they pray for their loved ones whose choices have helped establish those trends. Many are discouraged. Many don’t know what to do or to say. Many lament that their prayers and interventions do not seem to be bearing any fruit.

By Dr. Robert Moynihan, Inside the Vatican - Alexander Tschugguel, 26, the young Catholic man from Vienna, Austria, who tossed five Pachamama images into the Tiber River in Rome on the morning of October 21… Tschugguel revealed in a video this morning that he was, in fact, the man, unidentified up until now, who took the images from the Church of St. Mary in Traspontina.

By Ed Condon, Catholic News Agency - A 50 million euro loan request to secure the purchase of a bankrupt hospital was vetoed by Cardinal George Pell and financial authorities at the Institute for Works of Religion, commonly called the Vatican Bank, before it was approved by the Holy See’s central bank, APSA, where the loan breached international regulatory agreements… According to several Vatican officials, in late 2014 two cardinals requested that the IOR, the Vatican’s commercial bank, grant a 50 million euro loan to a for-profit partnership between the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and a religious order, which intended to purchase a bankrupt Italian hospital, then in government-administered bankruptcy.