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> Italiano> English> Español> Français> All the articles of Settimo Cielo in English * On account of a “slight indisposition,” Jorge Mario Bergoglio had to follow from home, via the web, the spiritual exercises for the beginning of Lent, held in the village of Ariccia in the Castelli Romani and ended today, Friday March 6. But the pope must not have missed a beat of what was said by the preacher he ardently wanted this year: the Jesuit Pietro Bovati, 80, professor of Sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Gregorian University, adviser to the congregation for the doctrine of the Faith and  for twelve years a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, of which he is also secretary. Bovati is a biblicist of some renown, highly esteemed by Pope Fran...

When Lions Clash: Leo XIII vs. Leo Tolstoy Tolstoy taught a progressive sense of “liberation” from marriage. Leo XIII understood the illusory nature of this freedom. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII established the Feast of the Holy Family. At the time, the family faced threats from the state and progressive movements like socialism. This year, we mark the 140th anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical Arcanum Divinae (“Divine Mysteries”). The encyclical Arcanum sought to uphold the Christian family in light of the “progressive” threats of civil marriage, polygamy and divorce. Pope Leo XIII faced a formidable literary opponent at the time — Leo Tolstoy, whose works War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) were celebrated as masterpieces. Tolstoy virtue-signaled “traditional family values,” presenti...

LEFT: Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, “The Madonna in Sorrow.” RIGHT: Oprah Winfrey speaks Saturday to a crowd of 15,000 in Denver (Photo by Tom Cooper/Getty Images). Until we find new ways to reach women and help them to see the deadly ideology that is sold to them every day as truth and light, the culture of death will continue. Recently, two alarming studies have surfaced showing just how uneducated Catholics are about key issues, particularly the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the immorality of abortion. As talking heads scramble to both help explain and remedy this situation, one question hasn’t been addressed: Are we doing the messaging wrong when it comes to educating women about the Catholic faith? Reaching Catholic women is a vital issue. As the heart of the...

ROME – Though it’s impolitic to say so out loud, probably no institutions on earth are benefitting more from the coronavirus panic right now than manufacturers and retailers of hand sanitizers, medical masks, facial tissues, and so on. Costco just reported a 3 percent sales spike in February alone due to off-the-chart demand for such products. A close second in terms of a coronavirus bump, however, might well be the Vatican. For one thing, the Vatican was recently on the verge of a full-blown health scare around Pope Francis, as he cancelled a series of events due to what’s been described as just a “light cold.” Under normal circumstances, such reassurances would only hold for so long. Now, however, the Vatican can cancel or curtail as many papal events as it wants, and no one will bat an ...

ROME – A mini-panic broke out in Rome Tuesday following an article in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero by veteran Vatican reporter Franca Giansoldati, who reported that Pope Francis has undergone a test for the coronavirus and the results were negative. Prompting the ferment is the fact that Francis has been suffering from what’s been described by the Vatican as a “light cold,” which has caused him to cancel several public engagements over the last week and to restrict himself to appointments within the Domus Santa Marta, the hotel on Vatican grounds where he’s chosen to reside since his election in 2013 – the anniversary of which will be marked in just a few days. Francis also was forced to bail on the annual Lenten retreat for the Roman Curia held in Ariccia, a town nestled in the hills...

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican confirmed the walled city-state’s first case of the new coronavirus Friday and closed some offices as a precaution while Pope Francis continued recovering from a cold. Vatican City’s health clinic, which is used by Vatican employees and their families, was shuttered for sanitizing following the positive test result received Thursday, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said. Separately, a Vatican official was put into a protective quarantine after a priest from France’s Catholic church in Rome tested positive for the virus. The official isn’t showing symptoms of COVID-19 disease but came into contact with the infected priest. In another precaution, the Vatican Apostolic Library said Friday it would keep its doors shut all next week. The library welcomes scholars ...

Pope Francis received in a private audience at the Vatican members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Region XIII for their “ad Limina Apostolorum” visit on Jan. 27. 2020. (Vatican Media) COMMENTARY: It is extremely rare to find anyone who emerges from an audience with the Holy Father without a highly favorable impression and without thinking that the Holy Father shares his position. Father Raymond J. de Souza The U.S. bishops recently concluded their ad limina visits to Rome, in which each of 15 groups of bishops spent several hours in an extended conversation with Pope Francis. Those colloquies got superlative reviews from one and all, with many bishops marveling at how frank, engaged, generous and wise the Holy Father was. Which confirms one of the key stories of...

The tabernacle inside the Church of the Assumption in Nashville, Tennessee. (Ian St France/Twitter) Fr. Bede Price, pastor of the parish, was able to safely retrieve the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle, and he was uninjured in the storm. Christine Rousselle/CNA. NASHVILLE, Tenn. — An historic Catholic church in the Nashville neighborhood of Germantown was among several buildings seriously damaged by a tornado Tuesday night. The tornado’s main path struck about 100 yards away from the Church of the Assumption in the Diocese of Nashville. The storm destroyed the parish’s north transept, sacristy, and rectory chimney. The winds also badly damaged the building’s steeple and roof.  Fr. Bede Price, pastor of the parish, was able to safely retrieve the Blessed Sacrament from the tabern...

ROME – There’s a sense in which Germany has become to Church politics what California is on the American scene, meaning a strongly blue state which tends to favor the most progressive choice on any menu. On Tuesday night, California by itself turned what otherwise would have been a Super Tuesday disaster for Senator Bernie Sanders into a mere setback, keeping his Democratic Socialist crusade for the presidency alive. In somewhat similar fashion, Germany’s Catholic bishops went to the polls the day before, and they, too, embraced a progressive as their new leader. To replace Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich, who’s served as president of the German bishops’ conference since 2014, they chose Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg. Bätzing, 58, reflects the broadly reform-minded, progressive ethos of...

This Sunday we are only eleven days into Lent, still very early along on our Lenten pilgrimage.  The readings share the theme of beginning the journey of faith, even while giving us a glimpse of our final destination. In all three years of the lectionary cycle (A, B, C), the readings for the Second Sunday of Lent always pair a key pericope from the Abraham narrative (Gen 12-22) with an account of the Transfiguration from one of the Synoptic Gospels.   This is because, in all the Gospels, the Transfiguration marks “the beginning of the end” of Jesus’ earthly life.  After the Transfiguration, Jesus “sets his face toward Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) and begins the “death march” toward the Holy City that will culminate in Passion Week and his crucifixion.  The Readings pair the b...

With the rise of Uncle Joe Biden the American public is being presented yet again with a Catholic politician who professes to keep his faith private, while exploiting his Catholic faith whenever he and his PR professionals think it expedient. Joe Biden seems like one of the old school “Kennedy Catholics” who go to church on Sunday and cut deals with the mafia on Monday, hobnob with the Bishops in smoky rooms on Tuesdays and schmooze lobbyists to get their family members cushy jobs on Wednesday. On Thursday they figure out what element of tricky Catholic teaching they can jettison to get a few more votes and on Friday eat fish at a swanky seafood restaurant because they’re Catholic. On Saturday they hang out with some top end billionaires and on Sunday they go to Mass at the parish of one o...

ROME – Say “Christianity” and “Middle East” to people who’ve been paying attention to events in the region, the and next word that would automatically come to mind for most probably would be “extinction.” By now, the statistics on the collapse of the Christian population in the Middle East are wearily familiar. The situation is worse in the war-torn nations of Iraq and Syria, for obvious reasons, than in historic Christian strongholds such as Egypt and Lebanon, but there too the pressures are strong and the trendlines alarming. Though there are promising pockets of resilience, such as the effort by Christians on Iraq’s Nineveh Plains to rebuild villages all but wiped out under ISIS occupation, most observers agree that the rise of anti-Christian violence fueled by jihadist intolerance has ...