Bremen-Wotlmerschausen: Catholic Parish Church Transformed as Refugee Center for Muslims |
Church made available for a year as a refugee accommodation
Image: Wikicommons
Bremen-Wotlmerschausen: Catholic Parish Church Transformed as Refugee Center for Muslims |
[NPR] His parents say his problems began 20 years earlier, when he was a student at St. John's Prep in Collegeville. They say their son wasn't the same after he began spending time with the Rev. Tom Andert, a prominent priest who was placed on leave earlier this year for a separate allegation of sexual misconduct.
The Spaniers say they're coming forward now because they want the culture at St. John's to change. Ben Spanier had attempted suicide before. His father, Eric, will never forget picking up the phone that night in 1994. On the other end of the line was the Rev. Tom Andert, the head of the boarding school at St. John's, where Ben was a junior.
"I answered the phone," Eric Spanier said. "He was calling from the emergency room in the hospital, so it was a shock."
He said he was relieved the priest was there to care for his son.
Saint John's Abbey, Heresy in Stone |
Edit: NCR says it's "remarkably strong". Incredulous:
[NCR] For the English-speaking world, the Ordinary Synod on the Family just came to a formal end, two months after its actual end, with the release of its final report in our native tongue.
The world was gleefully told by the enlightened—again and again and again—that it looked as if the Church was finally going to join the modern age by surrendering to the self-evident verities of the sexual revolution. Giddy at the prospects of Pope Francis’ supposed reforming spirit, the gay community’s leading magazine canonized the Holy Father as their “Person of the Year” before the Synod even started. While this chatter of reformation made the heterodox hopeful, it made the orthodox anxious. But all that is over now and there’s a very good reason that you’ve not been blasted with the news of the synod’s conclusions. It not only dashed the hopes of those who hoped the Church would jettison its historic and biblical teaching on sexual ethics, it blew them to hell.
http://m.ncregister.com/blog/gstanton/the-synods-remarkably-strong-final-report/#.VnF8ZzK9LKA
The church's synodal structure must be strengthened at all levels, Lehmann said, adding that Francis has made repeated appeals for a synodal church. For Lehmann, who was ordained during the Second Vatican Council and became Karl Rahner's assistant, this "synodality" was more important than possibly holding a Third Vatican Council. There are great opportunities for the church in a globalized world as long as it discards its centralist approach, he emphasized.
The council decrees have not always been adequately applied or implemented, Lehmann said. The fact "that we didn't take the societal changes that occurred after Vatican II, most particularly those of 1968, and the deep effect they had on people, seriously enough," was one the church's gravest failures.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/synodality-must-once-again-become-structural-practice-church-german-cardinals-and
ROME (Reuters) - Italian police have confiscated about 3,500 counterfeit parchments bearing blessings by Pope Francis and being sold to pilgrims in Rome, authorities said on Monday.
The bogus parchments, with elaborate lettering and pictures of the pope, were found in the printing shop of a souvenir store near the Vatican, and the proprietor was charged with producing counterfeit goods, a police statement said.
It said the parchments were printed in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English and had an overall value of about 70,000 euros ($77,168).
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0TX1WG20151214
Edit: we don't place much stock in petitions, but here it is from the Remnant.
Your Holiness:
Pope Celestine V (r. 1294), recognizing his incapacity for the office to which he had so unexpectedly been elected as the hermit Peter of Morrone, and seeing the grave harm his bad governance had caused, resigned the papacy after a reign of only five months. He was canonized in 1313 by Pope Clement V. Pope Boniface VIII, removing any doubt about the validity of such an extraordinary papal act, confirmed in perpetuity (ad perpetuam rei memoriam) that “the Roman Pontiff may freely resign.”
A growing number of Catholics, including cardinals and bishops, are coming to recognize that your pontificate, also the result of an unexpected election, is likewise causing grave harm to the Church. It has become impossible to deny that you lack either the capacity or the will to do what your predecessor rightly observed a pope must do: “constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.”
Quite the contrary, as shown in the annexed libellus, you have given many indications of an alarming hostility to the Church’s traditional teaching, discipline and customs, and the faithful who try to defend them, while being preoccupied with social and political questions beyond the competence of the Roman Pontiff. Consequently, the Church’s enemies continually delight in your pontificate, exalting you above all your predecessors. This appalling situation has no parallel in Church history.
Last year, speaking of Pope Benedict’s resignation, Your Holiness declared that if you felt incapable of exercising the papacy “I would do the same.” On the first anniversary of Benedict’s resignation, you called upon the faithful to “join me in prayer for His Holiness Benedict XVI, a man of great courage and humility.”
With no little trepidation, being under the gaze of the One who will judge us all on the Last Day, we your subjects respectfully petition Your Holiness to change course for the good of the Church and the welfare of souls. Failing this, would it not be better for Your Holiness to renounce the Petrine office than to preside over what threatens to be a catastrophic compromise of the Church’s integrity?
http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/2198-the-year-of-mercy-begins
Pope Francis on December 8th 2015 With the Fisherman's Ring. Generally He Wears a Silver Bishop's Ring from the Time Before His Election as Pope |
PARIS, December 9, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – In an interview this morning, Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said that Pope Francis “has called for a certain amount of control of birth,” while specifying that this would not include methods like the birth control pill.
Speaking to the BBC outside of the climate change talks in Paris, the cardinal suggested that limiting births can “offer a solution” to difficulties such as water and food shortages that are said to come from overpopulation and climate change.
"The amount of population that is critical for the realisation of this is still something we need to discover, yet the Holy Father has also called for a certain amount of control of birth."
Cardinal Turkson, described by the BBC as the Vatican expert on climate change, said while the critical level of population remains to be determined, the pope has nevertheless called for control of births.
Journalist Shows Her Weapon |
Edit: Insane. Mercy for everyone, as long as you're not Catholic.
[Vatican] They will also receive from the Holy Father the authority to pardon “even those sins reserved to the Holy See” (Bull of Indiction, n. 18). These sins include: Violation or profanation of the Holy Eucharist (CIC 1367), which the archbishop says occurs “much more frequently that one might think”; Absolution of an accomplice in a sin against the sixth commandment (CIC 1378); Unauthorized ordination of a bishop, which penalty is incurred by both the ordaining bishop and by the bishop who is ordained (CIC 1382); Direct violation by a confessor of the seal of confession (CIC 1388), which Archbishop Fisichella called “one of the most precious elements that the Church possesses”; and physical violence on the Roman Pontiff (CIC 1370).
Regarding what constitutes “physical violence” against the Pope, Archbishop Fisichella told journalists at Friday’s briefing: “I would say that we need to understand well ‘physical violence,’ because sometimes words, too, are rocks and stones, and therefore I believe some of these sins, too, are far more widespread than we might think.”
Citing the letter Pope Francis addressed to him in early September, outlining several points he wished to focus on in Year of Mercy, the archbishop reiterated that the Pope will extend to all priests, for the Jubilee Year, “the discretion to absolve of the sin of abortion those who have procured it and who, with contrite heart, seek forgiveness for it.”
Finally, he underscored that the Missionaries of Mercy “are appointed exclusively by the Holy Father, and that the faculty of forgiving reserved sins will be given to each one of them personally.”
http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/12/04/mercy_jubilee_press_conference_details_events,_initiatives/1191920