Frank the hippy pope

A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Some orthodox Lutherans have some fun with Pope Francis.  It’s a joke, so don’t let your heads explode.  It is sort of a nice play on the exertions of many conservative commentators to explain away some of Pope Francis’ statements:

There is a little shot at the end at the true Faith.  The part about those believing they are justified by faith alone going to hell….well, if there is one notion that has done more to disfigure and render Christianity just about neuter in the broad scheme of things, giving rise to private judgment, the rank error of sola scriptura, and then rationalism, endarkenment philosophy, and the entire panoply of modern errors, I don’t know of it.  Faith alone is the death of reason and the previous 1500 year understanding and practice of Christianity in East and West.  And yet, Fr. Yves Congar proclaimed that Luther’s heresies were the greatest…

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What are the odds?? Pope Francis Declares Model Jesuit a Saint

Pope Francis has declared the 16th century Jesuit Father Pierre Favre a saint, bypassing the usual procedures for canonization.

 

 

The Vatican announced the Pope’s decision on Dec. 17, Francis’ 77th birthday.

The Holy Father has long viewed Father Favre, the first follower of the founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, as a model figure.  

Born in the Rhône-Alpes region of eastern France in 1506, the French Jesuit met Ignatius while the two were college roommates at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, along with another future Jesuit, St. Francis Xavier. After ordination, Father Favre spent most of his ministry preaching Catholicism in Germany and elsewhere during the Protestant Reformation. He died in 1546.

Pope Francis has spoken of the influence Father Favre has had in his life, in particular his message of dialogue with anyone “even the most remote and even with his opponents.” In an interview with the Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, he praised Father Favre’s “simple piety, a certain naïveté perhaps, his being available straightaway, his careful interior discernment, the fact that he was a man capable of great and strong decisions but also capable of being so gentle and loving.”

Father Favre and Pope Francis are said to have many characteristics in common and share many of the same ideas. Father Favre was a supporter of Catholic reform and a pioneer of ecumenism. St. Ignatius used to say he was “someone who can squeeze water from a rock” and regarded him as the most efficient spiritual leader of all his followers. He also said Father Favre had “a gift for guiding people’s souls towards God” and wanted to appoint him as the Society of Jesus’s top representative in Rome.

Back in June, the Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire reported that Francis was looking to extend the liturgical cult surrounding the 16thcentury Jesuit to the universal Church. The newspaper reported that to canonize such a figure who lived centuries ago and based solely on the cult of holiness surrounding him “would be a unique technical procedure.”

The practice is mainly applied to individuals who lived a long time ago and for whom a canonical process was begun but not completed in their lifetime. Examples of this so-called “equivalent” canonization have been Cyril and Methodius who were proclaimed saints by John Paul II. Pope John XXIII also canonized Gregorio Barbarigo, whom Pope John had also held up as a model figure, in a motu proprio in 1960.

“Equivalent” canonization is a rare procedure, meaning popes can declare someone who has enjoyed widespread reverence over time deserves veneration by the universal Church without having to go through the usual canonization steps. These include proving two miracles attributed to the candidate’s intercession.

Pope Benedict XVI used the procedure in his pontificate to declare Hildegard of Bingen a saint.

During an audience with the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints today, Angelo Amato, Pope Francis also declared a miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God Maria Teresa Demjanovich, a sister with the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on March 26, 1901 she died in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on 8 May 1927.

The Pope also declared the heroic virtues of Servant of God Emmanuel Establés Herranz, diocesan priest and founder of the Religious Esclavas de la Virgen Dolorosa. Born in Campillo de Dueñas, Spain, on 1 January 1880, he died in Madrid on June 29, 1968.

Finally, the Pope proclaimed the heroic virtues of the Servant of God Giorgio Ciesielski, a layman, born in Krakow, Poland, February 12, 1929, and died in Egypt October 9, 1970.

http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/pope-francis-declares-model-jesuit-a-saint?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+zenit%2Fenglish+%28ZENIT+English%29

 

Whoa – Archbishop Nienstedt steps down – weak abuse allegation

A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt has removed himself from public ministry (but not resigned his bishopric) pending investigation of allegations he inappropriately touched a boy during a First Communion photograph in 2009.  I find this utterly unbelievable:

The Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis today announced that an allegation has been brought by a mandated reporter within the Church to the St. Paul Police of inappropriate touching of a minor male on the buttocks by Archbishop John Nienstedt. The single incident is alleged to have occurred in 2009 during a group photography session with the archbishop following a confirmation ceremony.  [How likely is it that someone is going to try to molest a child, or touch them in a funny way, during a group photo session? This stinks of a set up, more below] Archbishop Nienstedt emphatically denies the allegation. Upon learning of the allegation last week, the archdiocese…

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Is this not a human being?

Archdiocese of Baltimore cuts funding to group that promotes Planned Parenthood

• BALTIMORE, MD, December 16, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Archdiocese of Baltimore has cut funding to a local grantee of its Catholic Campaign for Human Development after Catholics raised concern over the grantee’s support for Planned Parenthood and the homosexual agenda.

CCHD reform advocates are praising Baltimore’s Archbishop William Lori for acting quickly on complaints, but are also expressing concern that the grant was awarded in the first place given that the group’s problematic associations were easily found on its website.

In an interview, Msgr. William Burke, director of Baltimore’s CCHD, said the Catholic agency had not reviewed the organization’s website as part of their compliance review. Asked if they will now be revising their vetting procedures, he said, “I guess we have to.”

A screen grab from a video by New Lens, which lost a grant from Baltimore’s Catholic Campaign for Human Development last month.

At the same time, the priest lamented the group’s defunding and the frequent criticisms directed at CCHD. He said the problematic activities he was aware of took place two years ago and that that does not mean the group is currently out of step with Catholic teaching. (See full transcript of LSN’s interview with Msgr. Burke at bottom.)

The grantee at issue is New Lens, a youth organization that aims to advance social justice causes through art and media. Baltimore’s local CCHD program awarded the group $13,000 in August.

The Baltimore-based pro-life group Defend Life reported in early November, however, that a quick viewing of News Lens’ website showed the organization’s version of social justice departs from Catholic teaching.

Read more:http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archdiocese-of-baltimore-cuts-funding-to-group-that-promotes-planned-parent/

The Advent Ember Days

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Guéranger: The Advent Ember Days

Posted by David Werling

Below is the entry for Advent Ember days in Dom Guéranger’s The Liturgical Year. He begins by writing: “Today the Church begins the fast of Quatuor Tempora…” If only this were true in our day and age!

The practice of the Ember days was for many years prior to the Second Vatican Council seldom, if ever, practiced, having fallen into disuse in many places. After the Second Vatican Council they were completely forgotten in a Church governed by the predominate attitudes of the day, and the various opinions of Modernism and liberalism that looked down on bodily mortification and anything that seemed disassociated with the new found “Jesus is my friend, not my Lord” spiritual and moral laxity. Worldly men, who had infiltrated the Church of Christ, wanted to bend religion into a system whose only objective was to justify sin, not forgive it, and bend man’s mind to earthly things, instead of inspiring him to strive, by the grace of God, for otherworldly excellence.

The pastors of Holy Mother Church did the faithful a great disservice by watering down the Church’s practices of fasting, abstinence, acts of reparation and other mortifications. It is a great injustice that, in a day and age that requires more than in any other man’s resolve to war against the lusts of the flesh, the pastors of Holy Mother Church, with minds clouded by the delusions of Modernism and liberalism, have denied to the faithful sound teaching concerning those practices that are so efficacious in gaining the graces that triumph over concupiscence.

It is not just a mere coincidence that the proliferation of error and moral laxity, through which the Church has had to suffered for over a half century, came on the heels of a generation that failed to practice and hand down to their children the precious gift of the Ember days. This failure was part and parcel of a general disdain for all those methods supplied by Holy Mother Church throughout her history that, when practiced with the right interior dispositions, gain all the necessary graces for man to triumph over temptation and the weakness of the flesh. Has the world ever before suffered the degree of immodesty as it does today? Has the world ever before been plagued by the degree of impurity that it is now? Has there ever been such an absence of wise resolutions and salutary counsel as there is today in a world wherein men, women and children fiddle away their time, staring mindlessly into television sets, or chasing after one meaningless distraction after another?

As this past decade has demonstrated, painfully, the filth of the modern world has struck deeply into a Church left vulnerable by these negligent pastors. The priest sex abuse scandal is a constant reminder that the Church has fallen victim to liberalism and moral laxity. The December Ember days were traditionally linked with the ordinations that occurred on the Saturday, and these days of fast and abstinence were offered for the intention of obtaining worthy priests. However, the faithful have failed in this duty, and the affects of this failure are clearly evident in our modern Church!

Is there any time in history in which men and women of good will should embrace with zeal and enthusiasm the practice of the Ember days? Happily the ever growing interest in, and return to, traditional Catholicism has brought with it a new appreciation for the Ember days. In traditional homes and communities the Ember days have once again taken a prominent place in keeping the time of the year. Wherever they flourish, no doubt, grace will flourish for the peace and welfare of God’s children.

Winter Landscape with a Church by Caspar David Friedrich, 1811

 

 

From
The Liturgical Year
by Dom Guéranger, O.S.B.

Today the Church begins the fast of Quatuor Tempora, or, as we call it, of Ember days: it includes also the Friday and Saturday of this same week. This observance is not peculiar to the Advent liturgy; it si one which has been fixed for each of the four seasons of the ecclesiastical year. We may consider it as one of those practices which the Church took from the Synagogue; for the prophet Zacharias speaks of the fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh, and tenth months. Its introduction into the Christian Church would seem to have been made in the apostolic times; such, at least, is the opinion of St. Leo, of St. Isidore of Seville, of Rabanus Maurus, and of several other ancient Christian writers. It is remarkable, on the other hand, that the orientals do not observe this fast.

 

Read more:http://arsorandi.blogspot.ca/2013/12/gueranger-advent-ember-days.html

DePaul University Hosts Justice Breyer, Author of Partial-Birth Abortion Ruling

This is an outrage!!!!!

Reblogged from: cardinalnewmansociety.org

DePaul University Hosts Justice Breyer, Author of Partial-Birth Abortion Ruling

December 16, 2013, at 4:29 PM  –   By Kelly Conroy  

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will deliver a special address at the 20^th annual Clifford Symposium at DePaul University College of Law in April, according to the University.

The symposium will explore the impact of Judge Jack Weinstein, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, on a wide range of topics.  It will also explore “what it means to be a judge and to seek justice in America’s courts,” according to the University.

Breyer wrote the majority opinion in the Stenberg v. Carhart decision in 2000, which struck down state laws banning partial-birth abortion. He wrote, “…this court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman’s right to choose.”

Breyer also recently voted against a Texas law that requires abortion doctors to have formal admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their abortion clinics.

“As a practical matter,” Breyer wrote, “the 5th Circuit’s decision to stay the injunction meant that abortion clinics in Texas whose physicians do not have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic were forced to cease offering abortions. And it means that women who were planning to receive abortions at those clinics were forced to go elsewhere—in some cases 100 miles or more—to obtain a safe abortion, or else not to obtain one at all.”

Breyer also argued that allowing the law to take effect “seriously disrupts” the status quo.

Catholic Education Daily recently reported that an officially recognized student group at DePaul University, the largest Catholic university in the country, is promoting a fundraiser to help pay for“gender-affirming” surgery to remove the breasts of a woman who identifies as a man.

Catholic Education Daily is an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society. Click here for email updates and free online membership with The Cardinal Newman Society.

Read more:http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102

 

MS Winters: Card. Wuerl “never treated the Truth as a wet rag to throw into other people’s faces”

From the CATHOLIC DISTORTER:  By Michael Sean Winters http://ncronline.org/

The Shake-up In Rome As few weeks back, I wondered why Cardinal Marc Ouellet had not been confirmed as Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops. Now, we know. This morning, the Holy Father announced a major shake-up of that all-important congregation, confirming Cardinal Ouellet as prefect, but shuffling the membership in profound ways, especially for the Church in the United States.

I confess to being a bit amazed. Nine months ago, Pope Francis knew very little about the Church in the U.S. But, the day of his election, a bishop in Latin America who knew him told me that the word he would use to describe him is “astute.” Indeed. In nine short months, Pope Francis realized that we have a problem in the hierarchy of the U.S. and that the problem had a name. Actually, two names: Cardinals Raymond Burke and Justin Rigali. Both of them have been removed from the Congregation for Bishops. Hallelujah.

 

http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/shake-rome

Cardinal Burke out at Congregation for Bishops, +Wuerl in, oh boy

Source

…. I think we all knew this was a real possibility, even probability after this election. 

Well no doubt now, +Wuerl is the new “kingmaker.”  

Be grateful if you got a “Burke bishop” because they won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.  I feel sorry for Chicago.  When +George is gone, there’s absolutely no way it will be Bishop Perry.  

Possibly if +Burke did receive conclave votes, there would be a major concern over his influence, and God forbid election, in future conclaves as well. 

via Deacons Bench

Quoting David Gibson

After last month’s annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I wrote a story handicapping the four American churchman who enjoyed growing influence in the new(ish) pontificate of Pope Francis.
They were Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who is one of the eight members of Francis “kitchen cabinet” of advisors on reforming the Roman Curia; Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, who was elected vice-president of the USCCB and is the likely incoming president in three years; Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, whose advice the Vatican has tapped and who was rumored for an important curial post; and Cardinal Raymond Burke, head the Vatican’s canonical court system and more importantly a member of the Congregation for Bishops.That latter role gave Burke a decisive voice in pushing through a number of key stateside appointments, sometimes against the wishes of U.S.-based bishops.
Burke was something of an outlier on that list — a very conservative holdover from the Benedict XVI era and a fan of the kind of high liturgical finery that Pope Francis does not take to, at all.
Today the calculus of the “Top Four” list changed, perhaps decisively, as Francis dropped Burke from the Congregation for Bishops and added Wuerl. The two cardinals are not known to be allies, to say the least. It’s even less likely now that they’ll be exchanging Christmas cards this year.
Wuerl will remain as Archbishop of Washington but the new appointment means he will make regular trips to the Vatican to vet candidates for bishop in the U.S. and around the world — perhaps the most important way that Francis can secure his legacy.

This is terrible news for the US Catholic Church

Will +Burke be ousted as the Apostolic Signatura?  In my opinion, yes. The now will be the opportune time with the reforms going on.  

If we are to believe reports, +Wuerl …. um, does not like ….  +Burke.  Rocco reposted his old article on the topic.   Also Francis’ Flush – At Bishops’ Table, Pope Runs the Wuerlpool   Note, Palmo doesn’t like Cdl. Burke either. 

 

Read more:http://badgercatholic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/cardinal-burke-out-at-congregation-for.html?m=1

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters accused of antisemitism after comparing Israeli government to Nazis

WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais

The former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has sparked a furious international disagreement by comparing the Israeli government to the Nazis.

The 70-year-old musician faces accusations of antisemitism after he said Israel’s “oppression” of the Palestinian people was akin to the Holocaust.

Speaking last week to the online US magazine Counter Punch, Waters said: “The parallels with what went on in the 1930s in Germany are so crushingly obvious.

“There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946. So this is not a new scenario. Except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”

Waters, who supports a cultural boycott of Israel, described the country’s Rabbis as “bizarre” and said they treated Palestinians and other Middle Eastern Arabs as “sub-human”.

Religious leaders hit back at Waters for what they described as an “antisemitic diatribe”. In a

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