Catholic Church

By Dorothy Cummings McLean, LifeSiteNews - Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, 74… explained that Francis wishes both the Academy for Life and the John Paul II Institute, of which Paglia is grand chancellor, to work “more broadly.”… One widening Pope Francis and Paglia envision is a rejection of absolute norms regarding human life and a redefinition of what it means… “Rather, the term ‘life’ must be redefined, moving from an abstract conception to a ‘personal’ dimension: life is people, men and women, both in the individuality of each person and in the unity of the human family.”

By Phil Lawler, Catholic Culture - But let’s take a closer look at that “informal context.” The Pope had been presented with a copy of How American Wants to Change the Pope, in which author Nicolas Seneze argues that a powerful coalition of conservative American political interests is working against the Pontiff. The Pope expresses a keen interest in the book, and in another offhand remark as he passed the book to an aide, described it as “a bomb.”… Seneze does not merely report that the Pope has American critics; he claims, in effect, that there is an American conspiracy against the papacy.

By Msgr. Charles Pope - Deliverance involves taking hold of the full freedom that God is given us, of helping the faithful who struggle to lay hold of the glorious freedom of children of God… St. Paul says that the Father has rescued us from the power of darkness and has brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of our sins… There is also a magnificent passage in the Acts of the Apostles in which St. Paul is told of his mission to the Gentiles by the Lord: I am sending you to [the Gentiles] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God …

By Edward Pentin, EWTN News - Depressed to be back in a deeply secular, soulless metropolis, I used to say that one felt more alone in a heaving Western city where communal bonds had been severed than in a remote bush area in Tanzania where community and sharing were an essential part of life… What I was really missing, though, was a deep sense of the transcendent — a society where everyone believed in the supernatural and were conscious of the reality of God’s existence, even if some had not fully embraced or come to know Christ. The experience I had was both life-giving and life-changing. Effectively evangelized through Tanzanian Catholics, I was received into the Church a few years later.