Catholic Church

By George Weigel, Catholic Herald - Perhaps the most successful example of a thoroughly effective inculturation in Latin America is the tilma of St. Juan Diego with its image of Our Lady of Guadalupe: a manifestly indigenous Mother of God whose vesture is replete with indigenous symbols. (That the Guadalupana has gotten far less attention at Synod-2019 than the “Pachamama” Incan idols that some bold souls took from the Church of S. Maria in Traspontina, conveyed to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s “Angel Bridge” as Castel Sant’Angelo, and tossed into the Tiber says….something. )

Catholic News Agency - The writings of newly-canonized St. John Henry Newman offer important reflections for contemporary society on freedom of conscience and the duty to search for truth, said a leading figure in international religious freedom… “Newman prefigured the Church’s 1965 Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae,” said Thomas Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute… Farr said that Newman’s well-known phrase, “Conscience has rights because it has duties,” offers an important reminder that we are obliged to form our consciences in truth, recognizing that “our freedom does not give us a moral right to do what is wrong.”

By Dr. Maike Hickson, LifeSiteNews - Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has declared his approval of a strong critique of the Amazon Synod and its working document which was published last week by Professor Douglas Farrow in First Things. While praising Farrow’s article as “very fitting,” the Cardinal went on to lament Church leaders who seem not to realize that the borders to the “old paganism” of “idolatry and superstition” are currently being crossed.

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker - The current Amazonian synod is a reminder that the struggles of Catholic missions to indigenous peoples is nothing new. Today is the memorial of St John deBrebeuf and his companions. The Jesuit missionaries to North America endured the most amazing hardships to bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to tribal people who were locked in superstition, in bondage to repulsive demons and trapped in a cycle of revenge, torture cannibalism and violence of the most unimaginable kind.