De Omnibus Dubitandum Est.

BY WAY OF CONTRAST with yesterday's post about a priest in my diocese leading his parishioners AWAY from the Catholic Church, spreading error & confusion, I am very pleased today to share an extremely edifying, interesting & enjoyable conversation brought to us by two EXCELLENT & holy men who are living Catholic truth and happily working in the Lord's vineyard here in Brentwood Diocese: I have to say I find these conversations so enjoyable to watch and to think about. It's proper! It is encouraging and heart warming. This is part of a series of wonderful conversations you can find on the Norbertine's Facebook page on holy subjects. Watch this discussion & compare it with Fr Fox's comments yesterday: IT IS ANOTHER RELIGION!!

The Apostle's Creed is rightly considered to be a faithful summary of the apostles' teaching. It is the ancient baptismal symbol of the Church of Rome. -Catechism of the Catholic Church, 184. I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father almighty; from there he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen. Often today priests and bishops refuse and avoid talking about the truths of the faith, especially controversial ideas which may appear antithetical to modern secular ears. They see...

  Occasionally, in discussing the unmitigated disaster which is Pope Francis, someone will say to me something like this: "that's just the media, read what he actually says and judge him on that". The problem with this is I do. I read pretty much all his stuff and pretty much everything is σκύβαλα, as St Paul puts it in  Philippians 3:8 .  Reading his stuff has made me more upset, not less upset and it makes the people who defend him look utterly ridiculous, because pretty much all of it wouldn't get a "D-" from any high school teacher. It is repetitive, self-referential and verbose. Why is everything about him as well? Take his recent ECONOMY OF FRANCESCO three day conference on economics. What's that? Never heard of it? Well that's because not a single major secular media reported substantively on the three-day jamboree.  This was despite media-savvy presenters like economist Jeffrey Sachs, eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, pantheist ex-priest Leonardo B...

Ralph Martin is a  highly respected academic and holds an STD from the Angelicum. He has published many books I have used in my own academic study. This talk must be listened to, it covers some really important topics. One of his most influential books is Will Many Be Saved . If you have drunk the Kool Aid of a generation of false prophets who have tried to tell us that there is no need to be worried about our salvation, we don't have to do anything and everyone is going to heaven no matter what, you need to acquaint yourself with Martin's work and what the Church HAS ALWAYS TAUGHT ON THIS SUBJECT! The watering down of the teachings of Jesus on these issues has led to a decimation of the Church's missionary work & a prevalence of universalism which is doing untold damage, as Martin puts it using biblical language: the wild boar has entered the vineyard and is rooting up the vines.

  This is a great Vortex. Last week I felt really disgusted to see the US Conference of Catholic Bishops come out and say that there were some problems with Joe Biden's policies. This follows close on the heals of their congratulating him for being a practising Catholic and their constant attacking of Trump and at least tacit support for Biden during the campaigning. This really is laughable - the bishops remain silent leading up to the election, rush to congratulate Biden before the results are finalised, and now express concern about his agenda? What a joke. https://t.co/0WuEM6DFdV — Mark (@sitsio) November 18, 2020 It's like now they think Biden is going to listen to them? Imagine if they had said all this before the election?!! Voris has got this so right!

Some good news - further to this post  about a recent meeting of the Toronto Catholic School Board during which a member reading from the Catechism of the Catholic Church was denounced and the document described as "treading in dangerous water" and "not proper", the Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto has broken his silence and intervened, sending a letter to the chair which gives a reasonable defence of the teaching and the importance of Catholic schools maintaining, well, their Catholicity (shock, horror!). The letter was posted on the Toronto Catholic Witness Blog and I reproduce it here for your edification and encouragement dear reader: He doesn't do a terrible job here, does he? How wonderful & refreshing to have a Cardinal Archbishop backing Catholic doctrine! Of course, the fact that it's gotten this bad says quite a bit about what's going on in Toronto with respect to the teaching, practice and passing on of the faith, but, let's face it, it...

  I know I moan a lot on here but part of the reason I do that is so everyone knows where we are and why things are the way they are. Not just in the Church at large, but locally. Despite the great gifts given to our dioceses in terms of time, money, buildings, etc, there is a great tendency to do nothing or support the wrong things. I suppose the obvious element here is leadership. You have to have strong leadership in any successful project. You have to know you can ask the leader if you don't know what to do. You have to be confident that the people in specific jobs know what they are their for and that they have the confidence of the person in charge. A bishop is not like the boss of a business. He is WAY more powerful! The bishops are sovereigns in their dioceses. The pope doesn't tell them what to do - the pope is the bishop of Rome and he does have universal jurisdiction but this is something which is very seldom exercised. It doesn't matter if there's an annoyin...

Angelo Becciu the Vatican cardinal sacked by Pope Francis amid a corruption investigation is suing an Italian news magazine , claiming that his ruined reputation has eliminated his chances of becoming pope and will undermine the legitimacy of any future papal election. In a simply astonishing display of entitled clerical careerism, Becciu is seeking 10 million euros ($11.9 million) in damages, to be given to charity, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Sassari, Sardinia tribunal against L’Espresso magazine, the weekly affiliated with Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica. Becciu resigned Sept. 24 as the prefect of the Vatican’s saint-making office after Francis presented him with allegations he had sent some 100,000 euros ($119,000) in Holy See funds to a Sardinian charity controlled by his brother. Becciu admitted he sent the funds to the charity- not his brother - and told reporters he had done nothing wrong. Becciu at the time of the transfer was the No. 2 in the Vatican secretari...

While praying this morning, I had an insight into why it is important to be authentic & clear in our Christian faith - & it might sound completely obvious to you, but it was somewhat of a revelation to me in a really personal way. In some ways, this insight has been driven by a number of separate encounters I've had over the last day or so. These are the "elements" of my insight if you like: The first is the ongoing Vatican debacle and the confusion and pain I see everywhere caused by Pope Francis. The Keys have always been a completely unproblematic part of my faith up until this point when it seems Peter has abandoned Jesus and is not very clear about where he is actually going. Obviously there are a lot of things going on. Perhaps this tweet yesterday summed it up: Leader of @USCCB shuts gate after horse has bolted https://t.co/eiZUVJK5oX — Mark (@sitsio) November 18, 2020 The US Bishops remain silent leading up to the election, rush to congratulate Biden be...

Canada: land of tolerance, acceptance and liberalism. Unless you're Catholic. At a November 11, 2020 meeting of the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB), three trustees shouted down a reading of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, condemned the Catechism's words as "dangerous", and warned the delegate to stop reading the Catechism.  Trustees publicly shouted down the Church's official teaching on homosexual acts, contained in paragraph 2357 of the Catechism. Cardinal Collins surely has a duty to speak with these trustees and explain what the Church teaches on this issue. The fact that the Church's moral teaching appears unacceptable to the culture of this school shows just how poorly we have done in passing on the teachings of Jesus. It must be the priority of those commissioned with teaching the faith to address this terrible imbalance and speak out against a liberalism which seeks to shut down every voice which presents a challenge to its false ...

This morning I wanted to share this beautiful and powerful video released by the Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC). Thanks to Ian Paul for sharing it and introducing me to it. It beautifully and powerfully presents the case, in accessible terms, for the ethic that sex belongs in marriage between one man and one woman, the Apostolic teaching of the Church, enshrined in Sacred Tradition and the Magisterium: the position laid out by Jesus Himself in Sacred Scripture.   The presentation locates the discussion of sexuality in the wider question of what has been happening in society at the moment, and our call to share the good news about Jesus. Importantly, in the opening comments by Jason Roache, it highlights the fact that the Church’s teaching is not something we just improvise, but something we both inherit and pass on, just as Paul comments in 1 Cor 15.3 that he is passing on what has been passed to him. Of course the idea that we are constantly "discerning" the...

I wanted to start a discussion about this, hopefully it will help my own understanding.  As a Catholic, I believe that God loves everyone He has created in His image and likeness with the dignity of the imago Dei .  Sex is something good, but something that can be dangerous and destructive when misused - like fire, or hurt us, like our appetite for food. Sex's purpose is procreation, but in the context of a loving marriage, a structure which exists to sanctify and enshrine the responsibilities of being a parent. Within this context, sexual intimacy also has an important unitive dimension. This duality is inseparable (you can't have one without the other). Church teaching is clear about this but so is Jesus . Because this is what I believe, I feel frustrated with the BBC pushing a social agenda on prime time tv that seeks to normalise a morality which contradicts the long held teaching of society. A same-sex pairing which breaks a norm and thus may or may not lead my chil...

  The interview has been transcribed and is posted in full at the National Catholic Register , this is the text: More than any other person except for Theodore McCarrick himself, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò is responsible for triggering the 449-page Vatican report released this week that details what other Church leaders knew about the disgraced ex-cardinal’s decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct, and the actions they took or failed to take with respect to what they had learned. As the report itself documents, the archbishop was the first senior Vatican figure to call concretely for action to be undertaken against McCarrick, at a time when Archbishop Viganò was serving as a senior official in the Secretariat of State. Then, after the archbishop was subsequently posted to Washington as the U.S. nuncio from 2011 to 2016, he was again involved with the Vatican’s handling of the McCarrick file. And in August 2018, Archbishop Viganò released his initial 11-page “testimony” regardi...

 Church Militant have done a superb job in breaking down the McCarrick Report in this presentation: I'm a businessman, nearly 50, I've been in business since the early nineties and I would say I have a fair grasp of how the world works. The old adage "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" attributed to English Catholic historian, politician, and writer Sir John Dalberg-Acton, is something I have experienced at very close quarters and on very many occasions, especially among small business owners. There is a huge temptation to cheat. When you gain an advantage - you poke your head above the parapet of normal life and your business achieves even a miniscule modicum of success, there is a common tendency to consider that, rather than the beneficiary of some stroke of chance, or the hard work of a team, you are somehow solely responsible for whatever small degree of success you may be experiencing. I have met literally thousands of business o...

The world has been waiting for two years for the answers as to how a Catholic Cardinal was able to use his position & privilege to travel the world, meet international leaders and abuse children and young men, in plain sight of his colleagues. The answer came in a 449 page document issued by the Vatican issued 10th November 2020. You can read the whole thing here . I'm going to give you an abridged version, but first of all I think it's really important to remember a few things. Firstly, let's hear from the man himself. In this speech given at Villanova University in 2013, the then-Cardinal McCarrick openly boasted of his vital influence in the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as Pope. The fact that McCarrick's support and influence was in Bergoglio's election is a fact which has been confirmed by others: Despite this, you may recall that Pope Francis denied knowing anything about McCarrick back in May 2018 in an interview . In August that year, on a plane a...