News

By Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Blog - I can’t disagree with any of (George Weigel’s) assessments, and it does look like bigger and darker storm clouds are on the horizon, but there is cause for great joy in all this… The vine is being pruned… People are waking up and realizing that being a Catholic is more of a roller coaster ride than a walk in the park… Catholics are hearing those words of Jesus Christ about the world hating them as it hated him. They’re also looking at a church they trust and realizing that her leadership has betrayed them. Good. They shouldn’t have trusted the human institutions of the church quite so much.

By Billy Ryan, uCatholic - John Paul II knew the importance of prayer: he was known to pray for many hours each day, interceding for both the Church and world and growing ever closer in his relationship to God. He believed prayer was his first duty as the pope to “obtain help from God and to be able to make things better.”.. “Prayer joined to sacrifice constitutes the most powerful force in human history. In prayer, you become one with the source of our true light – Jesus Himself.”

By Martin M. Barillas, LifeSiteNews - Pope Francis wrote, “We know that, given the seriousness of the situation, no response or approach seems adequate; nonetheless, we as pastors must have the ability, and above all the wisdom, to speak a word born of heartfelt, prayerful and collective listening to the Word of God and to the pain of our people."… "In recent years, the Church in the United States has been shaken by various scandals that have gravely affected its credibility," he wrote. "The Church's credibility has been seriously undercut and diminished by these sins and crimes, but even more by the efforts made to deny or conceal them…”

By Father Raymond J. de Souza, National Catholic Register - The Catholic Church ends 2018 with a heavy spirit. It is not the series of scandals alone, but the loss of confidence in the traditional solution in times of crisis, namely recourse to Rome, as adequate to the task... The year began with the most catastrophic papal trip in history. The aftermath of the disaster in Chile tainted everything that followed and seriously weakened the capacity of Pope Francis to take effective action... The papal trip to Chile in January had to deal with the “Barros affair”....