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Can (and should) women be ordained Catholic deacons?

New deacons from the Pontifical North American College kneel during their ordination in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Sept. 29, 2022. (CNS photo/Paul Haring) In August 2016, a commission was formed in order to look at questions that were raised with regard to women and the diaconate by the International Union of Superiors General, who asked Pope Francis about it in a May 2016 audience they had with the Holy Father. This first commission was held and examined primarily the historical question. The result of that commission was that they were at odds with one another. There was no consensus. In fact, the quote from Pope Francis is that they were “toads from different wells.” Then, following the Amazon synod, which again raised the question of admitting women to the diaconate, Pop...

Who knows the difference it might make to bring face-to-face singing into our homes once again…

In her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle makes a commonsense suggestion so simple we might miss its power and urgency. Make face to face conversations normal again. Here I offer a corollary suggestion. Make face to face singing normal again. The changes of practice in these two areas have much in common. For starters, while dramatic—and indeed of civilizational import—changes in conversation and singing have become so normal as to be barely noticed. We still ‘hear’ and feel like we participate in much talk and still ‘hear’ much singing. In fact, in a sense we’re fairly drowning in talk and music, so we might not feel the absence of either. But the reality is otherwise. “We are being silenced by our technologies.” Turkle’s words about conversati...

Catholic academic blasts Vatican’s Academy for Life as ’embarassing’…

Listen to this story: ROME – A Catholic academic participating in a Rome conference this week, which intentionally rivals one held by the Pontifical Academy for Life earlier this year, has voiced concern over the body’s recent activities, saying he believes they are “embarrassing” the church by failing to uphold core moral teachings. “As a father and as a Catholic intellectual, I’m really concerned about what the Pontifical Academy for Life is and the picture of the Church that it’s portraying to the world,” said Fulvio Di Blasi, an Italian lawyer and expert in ethics and St. Thomas Aquinas. “It’s embarrassing,” he told Crux, saying, “It looks like, sometimes, the entire work of some people in the church is to justify homosexual sex, which is really ugly. I say ‘ugly’ because in classical ...

Why the French bishops have launched the world’s first canonical criminal court…

Bishops will also be in charge of implementing the sentences, which can fall under three categories known by canon law. PARIS, France — This month, the French Bishops’ Conference (CEF) established a new legal structure to deal with crimes and offenses committed by clerics and laity within the Church, including sexual abuse of adults. It is considered a world first: To date, no other bishops’ conference has implemented any national structure of this magnitude. The tribunal “pénal canonique” national — “national canonical criminal court,” TPCN — is to some degree the result of findings by the French Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE). In its October 2021 report, the commission demanded such a tribunal. The French bishops had already announced the creation o...

On Solemnity of Immaculate Conception, House Passes ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ as Pelosi Declares ‘Spark of Divinity’ in Same-Sex Relationships…

“Today we stand up for the values the vast majority of Americans hold dear, a belief in the dignity, beauty, and divinity — divinity, a spark of divinity in every person — and abiding respect for love so powerful that it binds two people together,” the Democrat from California said. The final vote comes after the U.S. Senate, with the support of 12 Republicans, voted to pass the RFMA on Nov. 29. If it passes now, Biden, also a Catholic, has pledged to sign it into law. While it would not require any state to allow same-sex couples to marry, the RFMA would require states to recognize any and all marriages — regardless of “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin” — performed in other states. The U.S. bishops stated in a November letter to Congress that the bill’s amendments do not sufficien...

Remembering Jean-Marie Lustiger, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants who became the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris…

The son of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland who immigrated to France during WWI, Aron Lustiger was baptized at 16 and would come to prefer to be addressed by his Christian name Jean-Marie. Ordained a priest, he rose in the Church to become Archbishop of Paris in 1981 and named cardinal by Pope John Paul II. His recollection of his conversion to Catholicism during a lengthy interview paints a picture of the beauty and spiritual attraction of the Church in France.† A voracious reader as a child, he recalls that at the age of ten he found a book about the martyrdom of English Catholics during the reformation: They were imprisoned and persecuted for their faith. In one way, it was totally incomprehensible, since I had not yet studied history and had no idea about England or the reformation, or the d...

Computer hacks, Divine Providence and really helping others…

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Dec 09, 2022 This morning, starting at 7:15 am EST, CatholicCulture.org was the target of a robotic registration attack. This means a computer or a group of computers had been programmed to attempt rapid-fire registration on CatholicCulture.org. Sometimes the purpose of such attacks is to test stolen credit card numbers. At other times, the purpose is purely disruptive. However, since we had coded over the years an extensive number of registration/donation tests based on past experience with such attacks, I found on examination that none of these attempts—1,698 in all over a period of 4 hours and 28 minutes—got past our defenses. But the speed of the attack varied, and I became aware of it a little after 9:00 am when our website be...

Bicyclist rides San Francisco’s streets, finds 3 streets steeper than the official Guinness ‘World’s Steepest Street’…

[embedded content] This is the big one, Cycling California’s Steepest Streets “Season Finale…” Join Our Telegram Group : Salvation & Prosperity  

Celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25 is an ancient Christian practice — and pagan holidays had nothing to do with it…

Every year, various myths about Christmas circulate. Some are innocent misunderstandings of things from the Gospels, while others are downright hostile. One of the most common ideas is that Christmas is based on a pagan holiday, so it’s really “pagan” in origin. This claim is made by some secularists and even by certain Protestants. Before I was Catholic, I knew members of my Protestant congregation who didn’t celebrate Christmas because of its “unbiblical” pagan origins. Let’s see what the historical evidence has to say about some of these myths. Not a matter of faith Non-Christians who delight in saying that Jesus wasn’t born on Dec. 25 sometimes seem to take pleasure in the idea that they’re somehow undermining Christianity, but they’re not. Jesus being born on Dec. 25 is not a matter o...

The media are scapegoating Catholics for the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs [WSJ paywall]…

My state witnessed an unmitigated tragedy on Nov. 19 when a gunman opened fire in a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing five and wounding 25. Unfortunately, the reaction has thus far fostered more vitriol and division than peace and unity as the press has blamed religious communities, including the Catholic Church, to which the shooter has no apparent connection. “Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric leads to violence,” read the headline of a recent Denver Post report. The piece asserted that “hateful rhetoric directed toward transgender people and the broader LGBTQ community” has been aired from “church pulpits” to “school board debates and libraries.” It cited the Archdiocese of Denver’s school-admission guidance on transgender and same-sex-attracted students to substantiate its claim. The archdiocese’...

Meet Cora Evans, California’s Catholic mystic (and possible future saint) who was a convert from Mormonism…

MENLO PARK, Calif. — When Catholics gather for Mass on Christmas Day this year, the readings for the liturgy will include one of the most famous and powerful passages from the Gospel of John: “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.” The passage affirms the coming of the Christ Child as the fulfillment of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. But it does not describe the Virgin Mary’s actual experience delivering her Divine Son in that rough stable in Bethlehem. Catholics hungry for such details must look elsewhere, and one place to consider is The Refugee From Heaven, an “eyewitness account” of the story of Jesus written by Servant of God Cora Evans, a California resident and conve...

Time traveling to Bethlehem — some thoughts that ought to fill us with humility and joy…

Like many of you, I have been saying the St. Andrew novena this Advent. “Hail and blessed be the hour and moment In which the Son of God was born Of the most pure Virgin Mary, at midnight, in Bethlehem, in the piercing cold. In that hour vouchsafe, I beseech Thee, O my God, to hear my prayer and grant my desires, through the merits of Our Savior Jesus Christ, and of His blessed Mother. Amen.” The language is hauntingly beautiful. I’ve probably said this prayer hundreds of times. And yet, there is something I missed before: I was time traveling to Bethlehem. Because God is outside of time, He knows, of course, every prayer that will ever be uttered, even unto the end of time. We tend to have the point of view that our prayers, works, and sufferings “work” now, and forward into the futu...