Hong Kong TLM and Procession – “Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-Kiun knew exactly what he was doing when he posted online a photo of himself leading a Eucharistic procession after saying a traditional Latin Mass in Hong Kong … ” Cardinal Zen’s Bold Latin Mass Statement Sends Multiple Messages to Hong Kong (National Catholic Register)
St. Catherine’s Monastery – “Much of the Christian world, especially Eastern Orthodoxy, erupted over reports that, pursuant to a May 28 court decision, the Egyptian government was going to annex the historic St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Peninsula.” Dispute Over St. Catherine’s Monastery May Jeopardize Egyptian-Greek Rapprochement (Providence)
Conservative-Technologist Coalition – “In 2024, the US fertility rate had a near-record low of 1.6 births per woman, compared to a replacement rate of 2.1—just one instance of a global trend that is even more pronounced abroad.” Can Natalism Be Normal? (Compact)
The Habit of Being – “O’Connor’s work, fiction and not, is Catholic, gothic, Southern, and timeless.” Flannery at 100—and Forever (Modern Age)
The Last Judgment – “Does complete happiness in heaven mean rejoicing in the punishment of the damned?”But What If My Loved Ones Are in Hell? (Catholic Answers)
Sowers of Chaos – “The great theme of international affairs in the 21st century (so far) has been America’s failure to appreciate the implacable, ideological hostility of Russia, China, and Iran to the American-led world order.” Striking Iran Will Not Change the Long-term Strategic Picture—America Should Still Do It (Providence)
Federal Fertility Support – “The Trump administration is preparing to release an executive order aimed at expanding access to fertility treatments for American families.” President Trump, IVF Isn’t the Way To Support Reproductive Health | Opinion (Newsweek)
Such Things Must Happen – “There are, of course, major turning points in history, and America may have just passed one in bombing Iran over the weekend.” Wars and Rumors of Wars (The Catholic Thing)
A Paradoxical Pope – “Francis repeatedly called for patient listening and an ill-defined ‘synodal Church,’ even as he was far more autocratic than any of his immediate predecessors.” Christianity and the West, Part I (The American Mind)
Eucharistic Miracle in Orvieto – “Standing before that sacred altar linen, I realized I wasn’t just admiring a historical artifact. I was face to face with a living sign of the hope that still pulses at the heart of the Church.” How This Eucharistic Miracle Helped Spark Corpus Christi (National Catholic Register)
(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)
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Re: A paradoxical pope.
(Paradoxical? That’s a very generous way of putting it.)
This is a well reasoned, soberly stated assessment of the impious Bergoglian grotesquery that we all endured over the past dozen years.
We desperately need Pope Leo XIV to hit reset on Bergoglio’s many egregious, damaging mouthings of leftist cant.
It’s important for the Church that Jesus founded to become Catholic again.
Pope St. Leo XIII, pray for us.
Our Lady, guardian of our faith, pray for us.
Agree. Pope Francis was all over the map in his comments and the meandering path he was slowly taking the Church down. It is not a secret that he should never had been selected as Pope. My thinking it was a soft coup to get Pope Benedict to resign and select a liberal disguised as a moderate. The insiders wanted a path to promote their insidious liberal agenda and Pope Francis was their guy.
So now we have to hope and pray that Pope Leo is the real deal as the Pope we need. Frankly I hope that our Lord had enough of this past nonsense and decided it was time to put the Church back on a straight path and Pope Leo is the Pope selected by the Holy Spirit.
@ A Paradoxical Pope
We read: “Leo quotes Pope Francis in almost all his sermons and addresses, as if the Church somehow began anew, or at least underwent a paradigm shift, during Francis’s papacy that requires it to be the basis for all Catholic thought and action moving forward. That is ill-advised, to say the least.”
Maybe not entirely paradoxical. Pope Leo XIV refers to a “communio ecclesiology”–rather than to a blurred and mongrelized “synodality”–reopening the ecclesial space for distinct “synods of bishops” within the “hierarchical communion” Lumen Gentium) of the perennial Catholic Church. Pope Benedict used much the same language decades ago, when he spoke of an “ecclesial assembly”…
In correcting the errors of Protestantism, the restoration of the sacramentally ordained priest as more than a seeming “cult-minister” (Benedict’s term), but as a bearer of sacramentality through Holy Orders, also led to an unfortunate separation of the laity from the clergy—the loss of communio—”the problem of the laity, which arose at this time and still haunts us today [!].” The “original meaning of the word ‘ecclesia’—that is, a ‘coming together’” (“Successio Apostolica,” as Chapter 2 in Ratzinger/Benedict, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius, 1982/Ignatius 1987).
The corruption of “synodality” as recently practiced is not that it “listened,” but that it didn’t listen enough.
Looking ahead, we can attend to a correct understanding of the “sensus fidei”: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20140610_sensus-fidei_en.html Especially n. 12 on the defining predispositions, and n.44 citing the Second Vatican Council on the meaning of sensus fidei:
“…The article (Lumen Gentium, n. 12) which mentions the sensus fidei teaches that, having ‘an anointing that comes from the holy one (cf. 1Jn 2:20, 27)’, the ‘whole body of the faithful…cannot err in matters of belief’. The ‘Spirit of truth’ arouses and sustains a ‘supernatural appreciation of the faith [supernaturali sensu fidei]’, shown when ‘the whole people,…“from the bishops [!] to the last of the faithful”…manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals’. By means of the sensus fidei, ‘the People of God, guided by the sacred teaching authority (magisterium)[!], and obeying it, receives not the mere word of men, but truly the word of God (cf. 1 Thess 2:13)’.”
As we “walk together”, and in a succinct but effective way, is the “inverted pyramid” no longer a stumbling block?