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Generated by IJG JPEG Library In a disturbing story coming out of the Kansas City archdiocese, The Pillar reports: “It has recently been reported by two priests, having served in three different parishes, that upon their appointment to these parishes they soon discovered the long-term use of wines that were in fact invalid matter for the confection of the Eucharist,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann noted in a May 31 letter obtained by The Pillar. As a result, he wrote, in those parishes, “for any number of years all Masses were invalid and therefore the intentions for which those Masses were offered were not satisfied, including the obligation pastors have to offer Mass for the people.” “This is a gravely serious situation for which we must now petition the Holy See for guidance on restorat...

A case that is potentially the Roe v. Wade of Latin America is now being considered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica. The plaintiffs in Beatriz v. El Salvador are asking the court to declare the right to abortion to be an internationally recognized human right. Such a declaration would be a major setback for the right to life on an international scale. The right to abortion is absent from the world’s treaties, conventions, and covenants with the exception of the Maputo Protocol of the African Charter of 2003, where this right was inserted at the behest of its powerful advocates in the West. Until recent years, Latin America has been a region of strong pro-life laws, though in the past decade, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and other states have liberalized their abort...

“Fear no one,” Jesus says on the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year A. Then he gets deadly serious and declares: “Whoever denies me before others, I will deny before my heavenly Father.” Jesus wants us to stop cowering before the power of sin and sophisticated faithlessness, and his Church is listening. A week ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrated the anti-Catholic hate group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as “Community Heroes.” The mayors of Los Angeles and Anaheim, along with California legislators, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today celebrated them too. Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez joined his voice to thousands who protested the event, including recent Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron who said, “Boycott the Dodgers. Let’s pray for the defense of our faith and let’s...

Although the instrumentum laboris, or “working document,” for October’s Synod of Bishops makes clear that it “is not a document of the Church’s Magisterium,” the 50-page document undoubtedly does have something to say, propose, and arguably teach about the kind of synodal Church that Pope Francis has made such a priority of his pontificate — and perhaps about far more. This is true not only of the document’s first half, which describes “the characteristic signs of a synodal Church” and highlights “conversation in the Spirit” as a way of enacting this synodality, but also in the IL’s second half, where it proposes questions around three priority issues (communion, participation, and mission) and gets into controversial matters, such as lay governance, women’s diaconate, and priestly celibac...

MECHELEN, Belgium (AP) — The confessionals where generations of Belgians admitted their sins stood stacked in a corner of what was once Sacred Heart Church, proof the stalls — as well as the Roman Catholic house of worship — had outlived their purpose. The building is to close down for two years while a cafe and concert stage are added, with plans to turn the church into “a new cultural hot spot in the heart of Mechelen,” almost within earshot of where Belgium’s archbishop lives. Around the corner, a former Franciscan church is now a luxury hotel where music star Stromae spent his wedding night amid the stained-glass windows. Across Europe, the continent that nurtured Christianity for most of two millennia, churches, convents and chapels stand empty and increasingly derelict as faith and c...

On first encountering Father Victor B. Galeone at Baltimore’s St. Paul Latin High School in September 1965, my freshman classmates and I didn’t imagine we were meeting the future bishop of St. Augustine, Florida. What everyone quickly recognized, however, was that he was a language teacher unlike any we had met before. For Father Galeone — rail-thin with crinkly black hair, dressed in an immaculate cassock and full of energy and cheer as he bounced around the Latin I classroom — believed that we should learn Latin the way we had first learned English: by speaking it. So from the git-go, we followed this pied-piper of Latinity in a series of verbal exercises, built around four paradigmatic sentences, that got us accustomed to a highly inflected language in which word endings meant everythin...

Frozen bank accounts are freezing the Church in Nicaragua. Here’s why Skip to content A seminary in the Nicaraguan city of Bluefields announced this week it would cease operations, after the government froze its bank accounts last month — along with the accounts of hundreds of other Nicaraguan Catholic institutions, which the government says are complicit in an international money-laundering scheme.  But Church leaders say the alleged money-laundering is actually a charitable microloan program, and that the allegations of financial corruption are a pretext for the country’s government to seize Catholic properties and silence the Church.  Saint John Paul II Propedeutic Seminary. Courtesy photo. Share The facts On May 23, Fathers Eugenio Rodríguez and Leonardo Guevara of the ...

St. Thomas More remained fiercely loyal to his King, but even more so to the preservation of his king’s immortal soul. “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.” These are the famous words of St. Thomas More, spoken to the crowds moments before his public beheading on July 6, 1535, just two weeks after the execution of St. John Fisher with whom he shares his feast day. Both men chose death rather than betray their faith by acknowledging King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England.  I knew the story of St. Thomas More, and his commitment to his Catholic faith even in the face of a brutal death (the usual fate for convicted traitors was to be drawn and quartered. King Henry commuted the sentence to beheading for St. Thomas after the verdict was read). But as I recently r...