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Seven Ways Pope Francis Slapped Conservatives in the United States

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Allowing President Obama to Represent Himself as An Advocate of Religious Liberty. On Wednesday, while speaking at the White House, President Obama said, “Here in the United States, we cherish religious liberty….[The United States] stand[s] with you in defense of religious freedom and interfaith dialogue, knowing that people everywhere must be able to live out their faith free from fear and intimidation.” Meanwhile, President Obama’s IRS cracks down on religious charities and his Obamacare regime targets religious institutions; his administration looks into persecuting religious Americans for failing to participate in same-sex weddings. A well-timed comment from the Pope could have been useful here. Instead, he stood by and said nothing. Instead, he went to visit the Little Sisters of the Poor – and the media ignored it. The Pope knows full well when the cameras are on him. They were on him with Obama. They weren’t during his side jaunt to visit those victimized by the President.

Ripping Capitalism Before Congress. Speaking before Congress, the Pope spent an inordinate amount of time lecturing legislators on the need to redistribute wealth in the name of the poor. He praised Dorothy Day, a Catholic organizer who once wrote, “We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists ‘of conspiring to teach [us] to do,’ but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.” Senator Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)16% (Socialist-VT) was ecstatic. . .

Pushing Environmental Extremism. The Pope spent a significant amount of time before Congress talking about climate change and encouraging Congress to restrict American economic growth to fight that chimera. But at the United Nations, he really let loose, suggesting that the environment has “rights” – an argument unfamiliar to many readers of the Bible. People may have obligations toward the environment, but the environment has no freestanding “rights” from humanity; God does not weep when a tree is used for lumber to house a poor family. This logic leads to the Malthusian anti-humanism of the deep green left. . .

Ignoring Abortion, Talking Death Penalty. The Pope said nothing about abortion before President Obama. Then, while speaking before Democrats in Congress who support federal funding for abortion machine Planned Parenthood, he said that all human life must be treated with respect – and proceeded to glide right over the abortion issue entirely, settling on the death penalty instead. As I noted yesterday, 35 murderers were executed in 2014 in the United States. One million unborn children were killed. Some say the Pope didn’t have to get explicit about abortion. Just why in the hell wouldn’t he? He did mention the unborn at the United Nations with one word. Should we celebrate such courage?

At 10:10 in the below video, John Zmirak talks about the Pope:

Ignoring Same-Sex Marriage. The Pope encouraged marriage in his speech before Congress, and talked vaguely of the value of family. He complained of threats to the family. But he said nothing about what those threats were – with the very Supreme Court that declared itself above God in terms of defining marriage sitting in front of him.

(Read more from “Seven Ways Pope Francis Slapped Conservatives in the United States” HERE)

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Unstable Boehner Bawls During Pope’s Speech to Congress

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Boehner Bawls, Pope Ignores Abortion, Homosexual Marriage

In yet another emotional outburst that some believe denotes instability, Speaker of the House Boehner began crying during the Pope’s speech to Congress yesterday. Regrettably, RINO Boehner apparently wasn’t crying over the fact that the Pope utterly ignored the failure of the Congress to defund the barbaric Planned Parenthood, or made no comment about the atrocious homosexual marriage decision by the Supreme Court.

Incidentally, the Pope spent much of his moral capital criticizing the United States for the death penalty and the few hundred justifiable executions that have occurred, ignoring the fact the we’ve killed 60 million of our own by abortion since 1973.
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Listen to Dr. John Zmirak’s Analysis of the Pope’s Visit below. The discussion regarding the Pope begins at 10:10.


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Pope Francis Urges Congress to Act

By Paul Singer. In the first-ever papal address to a joint meeting of Congress, Pope Francis called on Americans Thursday to embrace immigrants from Latin America and around the world.

“Our world is facing a refugee crisis of a magnitude not seen since the second World War,” the pope said, including “thousands of persons (who) are led to travel north in search of a better life.

“We must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation,” Francis said in a 45-minute speech. “To respond in a way which is always humane, just and fraternal. We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome.”

Speaking slowly in English before a packed House chamber including the assembled members of Congress and hundreds of dignitaries and reporters, the Argentine pope said, “We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us once were foreigners.”

The pope’s immigration plea comes in the middle of a fierce debate in American politics about illegal immigration, fueled in part by Donald Trump’s strong campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump launched his campaign with a tirade against Mexico for sending “rapists” across the border and has promised that if elected he will build an impenetrable fence across the U.S./Mexican border. (Read more from “Pope Francis Is Urging Action to These Issues in Trip to U.S.” HERE)

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Senator Sessions Unswayed by Pope Francis on Immigration, Ect.

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Pope Francis in WashingtonSen. Jeff Sessions won’t boycott the pope’s address to Congress Thursday, but the Alabama Republican doesn’t expect to be swayed by what he says on immigration, climate change or the economy.

“He’s said things close to open borders, which I think is wrong, and his opinion is no more persuasive to me than the Wall Street Journal’s. I don’t agree with either one,” Sessions told CQ Roll Call in a hallway interview Tuesday.

“It’s always dangerous for church leaders to start opining on complex matters of which they haven’t had a chance to learn over the years. I mean, we’ve been wrestling with immigration for 30 years. That’s a lot of knowledge. So the pope is not invested in that,” Sessions said.

He continued, “It’s all right for him to call on us to establish an immigration law that serves the national interest and assists people, but how that’s done, I think he probably is not sufficiently informed, and I would say that despite some of the biblical things, Nehemiah went back to Jerusalem and the Lord commanded him to build a wall.

“So, [there are] many references in the Old Testament about the legitimacy of nations or countries or tribal areas, deciding who goes in and through and who does not. So that’s part of it.” (Read more from “Senator Sessions Unswayed by Pope Francis on Immigration Ect.” HERE)

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Explosive Video: Pope ‘Will Show Whose Side He’s on’ During Synod, Says Archbishop

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shutterstock_225979561_810_500_55_s_c1The first hard-hitting words by orthodox cardinals and archbishops about the “current crisis” in the Catholic Church have been sounded. Previous comments by Vatican Cardinal Raymond Burke have been more guarded but as the Synod nears, the reality of a looming schism in the Church has pushed him and other Church leaders to a painful willingness to be frank in publicly warning about the seriousness of what is facing the Church.

Speaking to the idea proposed in the mid-term report of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family and repeated by various bishops’ conferences, he says, “It is heresy to teach that homosexual relations are not disordinate or are not disordered or have positive elements.”

The comments come in a newly released video by the Polish publication Polonia Christiana called Crisis in the Church. In addition to Cardinal Burke, the video features Archbishop Jan Pawel Lenga, who takes aim at Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops conference and one of Pope Francis’ Council of Nine advisors. Speaking of Marx’s acceptance of communion for remarried divorcees and his statement that the Church in Germany “is not a subsidiary of Rome,” Archbishop Lenga said, “There was Marx, Karl Marx. And if present Marx says similar things, then there is no real difference.”

Lenga, the emeritus archbishop of Karaganda, Kazakhstan, added that if the Church in Germany thinks they are so superior, “it’s some kind of Phantom, we should chase it away by the sign of the Cross.”

“The Pope during the Synod will show whose side he is on,” said Archbishop Lenga. “If he accepts the statement of those who want to distribute Holy Communion to the divorced, there would be a heresy in the Church, and if he does not accept, there could be a schism in the Church.” (Read more from “Explosive Video: Pope ‘Will Show Whose Side He’s on’ During Synod, Says Archbishop” HERE)

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Conservative Dissent Is Brewing Inside the Vatican

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Pope FrancisOn a sunny morning earlier this year, a camera crew entered a well-appointed apartment just outside the 9th-century gates of Vatican City. Pristinely dressed in the black robes and scarlet sash of the princes of the Roman Catholic Church, the Wisconsin-born Cardinal Raymond Burke sat in his elaborately upholstered armchair and appeared to issue a warning to Pope Francis.

A staunch conservative and Vatican bureaucrat, Burke had been demoted by the pope a few months earlier, but it did not take the fight out of him. Francis had been backing a more inclusive era, giving space to progressive voices on divorced Catholics as well as gays and lesbians. In front of the camera, Burke said he would “resist” liberal changes — and seemed to caution Francis about the limits of his authority. “One must be very attentive regarding the power of the pope,” Burke told the French news crew.

Papal power, Burke warned, “is not absolute.” He added, “The pope does not have the power to change teaching [or] doctrine.”

Burke’s words belied a growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis’s papacy and the powerful hierarchy that governs the Roman Catholic Church.

This month, Francis makes his first trip to the United States at a time when his progressive allies are heralding him as a revolutionary, a man who only last week broadened the power of priests to forgive women who commit what Catholic teachings call the “mortal sin” of abortion during his newly declared “year of mercy” starting in December. On Sunday, he called for “every” Catholic parish in Europe to offer shelter to one refugee family from the thousands of asylum-seekers risking all to escape war-torn Syria and other pockets of conflict and poverty. (Read more from “Conservative Dissent Is Brewing Inside the Vatican” HERE)

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Pope Francis: Every Catholic Institution in Europe Needs to Take in One Refugee Family

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Pope Francis waves as he leads his weekly audience in Saint Peter's Square at the VaticanIn his most forceful appeal to date, Pope Francis launched an urgent plea Sunday asking all Catholic institutions on Europe to take in one refugee family, beginning with his own diocese of Rome . . .

“Faced with the tragedy of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from death by war and hunger,” Francis said, “the Gospel calls us, asks us to be ‘neighbors’ to the smallest and abandoned” . . .

“God,” Francis said, “is not closed in on Himself, but opens and connects with humanity. In his great mercy, he exceeds the abyss of the infinite difference between Him and us, and comes to us.”

Citing the Gospel of the day, Francis said that we are often “closed in on ourselves, and we create so many inaccessible and inhospitable islands. Even the most basic human relationships sometimes create situations incapable of reciprocal openness: closed couples, closed families, closed groups, closed parishes, closed nations” . . .

Therefore, as we approach the Jubilee of Mercy, Francis said, “I appeal to the parishes, religious communities, monasteries and shrines throughout Europe to express the reality of the Gospel and accommodate a family of refugees.” (Read more from “Pope Francis: Every Catholic Institution in Europe Needs to Take in One Refugee Family” HERE)

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Open Borders Catholics Falsify Church Teaching – and Profit From It

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ap_pope-francis_ap-photo10-e1440349260324-640x479Pope Francis’ imminent visit to America is being spun by secular media as a political bonus for Democrats. No one, it seems, expects the pope to deliver a speech prophetically denouncing the human organ trafficking of Planned Parenthood, the grave threats to religious liberty in America, or even the ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Middle East.

Instead, we are told that Pope Francis will emphasize his areas of agreement with the left over climate change, inequality, and immigration. If any congressmen are squirming in their seats, it is expected, it will be those prolife Catholic Republicans who differ with the pope on these latter issues.

As a Catholic, I still hold out hope that the pope will disappoint expectations, and speak up on subjects that are life-and-death, doctrinally clear, and rooted in genuine Catholic morality — rather than parroting the agenda of the secular, globalist left. But the actions of U.S. bishops in recent weeks are making it harder to hold on to that hope. Most sickening was the statement where Francis’ handpicked Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago drew a moral equivalency between the butchery at Planned Parenthood and the inconveniences faced by illegal aliens, Medicaid recipients, and convicted killers. Cupich brazenly cloaked himself in the same “seamless garment” that his predecessor Cardinal Joseph Bernardin had crafted as a bulletproof vest for pro-abortion Catholic Democrats.

But it’s not just the bleeding edge of the Catholic left that feeds the secular media narrative. The widely-respected Abp. Charles Chaput, seen by many as the most conservative major Catholic prelate, recently delivered a speech on immigration that tracks exactly with the positions of the Democratic Party and radical immigrant activists groups such as La Raza. Chaput defended birthright citizenship for children of illegals, opposed deportations, and even condemned attempts to refine our legal immigration criteria to focus on skilled immigrants, rather than relatives of recently amnestied illegals. TV networks and Democratic candidates will eagerly feed on his remarks, in their ongoing effort to portray conservative Catholics as “dissenters” from “Catholic social teaching,” no purer in their religious allegiance than those who “dissent” from the Church’s teaching on selling baby limbs in medical waste coolers.

This narrative is entirely fictitious. Abp. Chaput’s remarks do not reflect real Catholic teaching on immigration — not the text of the current Catechism, nor the historic practice of Catholic countries, including the Papal States, on immigration. (To how many Muslims has the Vatican granted citizenship?) No more do Pope Francis’ speculations on the causes of inequality, or the vagaries of earth’s climate, have the slightest guarantee of religious authority. On all of these matters, popes and bishops are merely playing pundits, speaking beyond their proper authority and undermining it in the process. (Read more from “Open Borders Catholics Falsify Church Teaching – and Profit From It” HERE)

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Pope Appoints Radical Pro-Homosexual to Important Vatican Position; Conservative Catholics Appalled

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By Lisa Bourne. Pope Francis has appointed radically liberal, pro-homosexual Dominican Father Timothy Radcliffe as a consultor for the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. . .

Father Radcliffe, an Englishman, author and speaker, was Master of the Dominican order from 1992 to 2001, and is an outspoken proponent of homosexuality.

“We must accompany [gay people] as they discern what this means, letting our images be stretched open,” he said in a 2006 religious education lecture in Los Angeles. “This means watching ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ reading gay novels, living with our gay friends and listening with them as they listen to the Lord.”

In 2005, as the Vatican deliberated the admission of men with homosexual tendencies to study for the priesthood in the wake of the Church sex abuse scandal, Father Radcliffe said that homosexuality should not bar men from the priesthood, and rather, those who oppose it should be banned.

As a contributor to the 2013 Anglican Pilling Report on human sexual ethics Father Radcliffe said of homosexuality:

“How does all of this bear on the question of gay sexuality? We cannot begin with the question of whether it is permitted or forbidden! We must ask what it means, and how far it is Eucharistic. Certainly it can be generous, vulnerable, tender, mutual and non-violent. So in many ways, I would think that it can be expressive of Christ’s self-gift. We can also see how it can be expressive of mutual fidelity, a covenantal relationship in which two people bind themselves to each other for ever.
Father Radcliffe often celebrated Mass for the U.K. dissident group Soho Masses Pastoral Council (now renamed the LGBT Catholics Westminster Pastoral Council).” (Read more from “Pope Appoints Radical Pro-Homosexual to Important Vatican Position; Conservative Catholics Call it an “Absolutely Shocking Papal Appointment”” HERE)

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Pope’s Pronouncements Making Trouble for GOP Catholics

By Ben Schreckinger. Catholic Republicans are developing a pope problem. Earlier this month, Francis recognized Palestinian statehood. This summer, he’s going to issue an encyclical condemning environmental degradation. And in September, just as the GOP primary race heats up, Francis will travel to Washington to address Congress on climate change.

Francis may be popular with the general public, but key Republican primary constituencies — hawks, climate-change skeptics and religious conservatives, including some Catholics, are wary of the pope’s progressivism. Some, pronouncing themselves “Republicans first and Catholics second,” even say they would look askance at a candidate perceived to hew too closely to the bishop of Rome. This internal conflict flips a familiar script, in which Democrats like John Kerry and Joe Biden were labeled “cafeteria Catholics” when their stances on social issues like abortion and gay marriage differed from those of the church.

“In northwest Iowa, we are discussing this a great deal, and sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile the pronouncements we read from the Holy Father with our conservative principles,” said Sam Clovis, a Catholic and political activist who’s run for U.S. Senate and state treasurer in Iowa.

Jeb Bush — who praised the pontiff in a commencement speech at Liberty University this month — could lose out in the Iowa caucus, said Clovis. “It’s going to cause a lot of problems for Jeb Bush, because Republicans are simply not going to take him seriously,” he said.

Bush declined to address whether his admiration for the pope might affect how religious conservatives view him. In his speech at Liberty he said, “I cannot think of any more subversive moral idea ever loosed on the world than ‘the last shall be first, and the first last.’ (Read more from “Pope’s Pronouncements Making Trouble for GOP Catholics” HERE)

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Homosexual Marriage Will Split the Catholic Church

By Damian Thompson. Homosexuality as an issue is a greater threat to the Catholic Church worldwide than the sex abuse scandals. Here’s why . . .

• The Magisterium of the Church has always condemned homosexual acts, though recently Rome has emphasised that the orientation itself is not sinful. Critics say that’s a bit like saying you can be left-handed so long as you don’t write with your left hand, but there you go.

• Many liberal bishops, however, have changed their minds on gay issues. First they said homosexuality was ‘a matter for the confessional’, which I’ve always thought was a slippery evasion, but civil unions were unthinkable. Now they say that civil unions are ‘acceptable’ – I’m quoting HE Cormac Card. Murphy O’Connor, former leader of the Church in England and Wales and said to be an intimate of the Pope, though he would no doubt deny it with his trademark aw-shucks modesty. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is part of the ‘greatest evil’ in our country, the breakdown of the family. That’s Cormac again. It is, I think, possible to oppose same-sex marriage on moral grounds without being convinced that it leads to family breakdown. But, as the great sociologist James Davison Hunter pointed out in his 1991 book Culture Wars, mainstream churches have rather given up on denouncing sin on the grounds that it imperils your immortal soul. That doesn’t play well on telly. Instead they’ll reach for a humanitarian argument – abortion, for example, causes depression in women who’ve had one. Or, in this case, gay marriage destroys families.

• In the West, practising Catholics – let alone lapsed ones – are strikingly more gay-friendly than they were even 10 years ago. To quote Pew Research, ‘among churchgoing Catholics of all ages – that is, those who attend Mass at least weekly – roughly twice as many say homosexuality should be accepted (60 per cent) as say it should be discouraged (31 per cent)’. Admittedly, practising Catholics have been merrily disregarding Catholic teaching on contraception for years, safe in the knowledge that no one has a clue whether they follow the rules. But – no offence – gay couples in church often stick out a mile. If they’re in a civil union, many priests will refuse to give the Communion – or, alternatively, make a big show of allowing it. So much depends on the parish. Indeed, attitudes towards gays have become an easy way of distinguishing conservative from liberal parishes, and of creating division in the first place.

• Liberal bishops and priests, even some cardinals, are beginning to change their tune on same-sex marriage. Here’s one reaction to Ireland’s gay vote: ‘I appreciate how gay and lesbian men and women feel on this day. That they feel this is something that is enriching the way they live. I think it is a social revolution.’ That was the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, an arch-liberal who wins applause in the Irish media by attacking old-style Catholic prelates (many of whom, conveniently, are deeply compromised by covering up child abuse). He’d ordain Graham Norton if it were not for the fact that, unusually, Norton is a Southern Irish Protestant. Martin followed his comment with some waffle about fresh ways of getting the Church’s message across but – as ever – he’d given the hacks their headline. Actually, though, Martin has a point. Why should the Catholic stance gay marriage be radically different from its attitude towards civil unions? Gay marriage doesn’t exist according to the Church. There are various answers to this but they’re not terribly convincing. . .

• But (see above) Catholics have a Magisterium whose teachings on homosexuality can’t be changed without the Church deciding that it has the authority to scrap them. At which point some traditional Catholics will up sticks to the modern equivalent of Avignon and we’ll have two popes. Or three, if dear Benedict XVI is still alive. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Pope Says it is Wrong to Equate Islam with Violence

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Umit Bektas

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Umit Bektas

Pope Francis said on Sunday that equating Islam with violence was wrong and called on Muslim leaders to issue a global condemnation of terrorism to help dispel the stereotype.

Francis, the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, told reporters aboard his plane returning from a visit to Turkey that he understood why Muslims were offended by many in the West who automatically equated their religion with terrorism.

Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, caused storms of protest throughout the Islamic world in 2006, when he made a speech that suggested to many Muslims that he believed Islam espoused violence.

Benedict said he had been misunderstood and apologized. But this year, the image of a violent religion has once more been promoted by Islamic State, who have seized swathes of Syria and Iraq, slaughtering or driving out Shi’ite Muslims, Christians and others who do not share their radical brand of Sunni Islam.

The Argentine pope, who has been trying to foster cooperation with moderate Islam in order to work for peace and protect Christians in the Middle East, said it was wrong for anyone to react to terrorism by being “enraged” against Islam.

Read more from this story HERE.

Cardinal Raymond L. Burke Demoted by Pope Francis for Orthodox, Pro-Family Views

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Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Cardinal Raymond L. Burke, a high-ranking Vatican Cardinal, was relegated by Pope Francis from his position of overseer of the highest judicial authority in the Roman Catholic Church, second only to the supreme ecclesiastical judge of the Pope himself, to a no-responsibility figurehead position running a charity. Suggested as being at the heart of the move is the Cardinal’s strong, conservative views, especially in opposition to gay rights and abortion.

Calling Cardinal Burke “hardly one of the Pope’s favorites,” theColumbus Dispatch on Nov. 9 said the Argentine pontiff and Holy Father reduced Burke to a “ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.” Burke previously served as the Cardinal Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.

Burke has been in the Pope’s peripheral for a few years. In late 2013, Francis passed on renewing Cardinal Burke’s position on the Congregation for Bishops council – a powerful Vatican establishment that oversees the appointment of Bishops. Burke, an outspoken opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage, once famously prevented John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, from receiving communion because Kerry was an open advocate for abortion.

In response to his being replaced on the Bishop Congregation council last year, Burke said: “One gets the impression, or it’s interpreted this way in the media, that [Pope Francis] thinks we’re talking too much about abortion, too much about the integrity of marriage as between one man and one woman. But we can never talk enough about that.”

Read more from this story HERE.