Tag: vatican

Catholic Church To Excommunicate Priests for Following New US State Law

The Catholic Church has issued a warning to its clergy in Washington state: Any priest who complies with a new law requiring the reporting of child abuse confessions to authorities will be excommunicated.

The new law, which will take effect on July 27, eliminates the long-standing confidentiality of the confessional, forcing Catholic leaders and lawmakers into a highly charged standoff over religious liberty and child protection.

However, the Archdiocese of Seattle and several bishops argue that the law not only contravenes church doctrine but crosses constitutional lines, while supporters maintain it is a crucial step to protect minors from abuse.

Newsweek contacted the Archdiocese of Seattle and Washington Governor Bob Ferguson and the three Democratic state senators who sponsored the bill for comment via email and online inquiry forms.

The issue spotlights the enduring tension between religious freedom and the state’s duty to protect children from abuse. By compelling clergy to breach the confessional seal, Washington joins a small group of states stripping traditional confidentiality protections.

The law has triggered a national conversation about the boundaries of church and state, setting a precedent that could have implications for religious practices and privileged communications nationwide. The outcome may influence how other states approach mandated reporting requirements for clergy, especially as constitutional and civil rights groups enter the debate.

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Sexual abuse of nuns: one of the Catholic Church’s last taboos

Nuns sexually assaulted by priests are one of the last Catholic taboos, but with reports of abuse rising, it is a scandal that will be difficult for the future pope to ignore.

“In the past, the nuns suffered a lot and couldn’t talk about it to anyone; it was like a secret,” Sister Cristina Schorck told AFP, walking through St Peter’s Square with her parents.

The 41-year-old Brazilian, who works with the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians in Rome, said Pope Francis, who died last month, opened “a first door” for women to speak out.

After an unprecedented summit at the Vatican on clerical sexual violence in 2019, a series of measures were taken, including lifting the pontifical secret on abuse and an obligation for people to report cases to their superiors.

“It’s both still a taboo and something that has progressed” because “it’s never been talked about as much as it is today,” Sister Veronique Margron, President of the Conference of Religious of France, told AFP.

The slow shift in attitudes is exemplified by the case of the influential Slovenian priest and mosaics artist Marko Rupnik, accused by nuns of sexual and psychological violence against them in the early 1990s.

It was only under pressure that Francis lifted the statute of limitations in 2023 to open proceedings against him.

Laura Sgro, the Italian lawyer for five of his accusers, told AFP that nuns should be better protected “both by states and by canon law”, notably by extending the statute of limitations, and said the next pope must act “immediately”.

Victims’ associations say the Vatican has not done enough, particularly by refusing to remove confessional secrecy.

“Things are moving forward step by step,” a senior ecclesiastical official told AFP on condition of anonymity, pointing out that Francis “has denounced all forms of abuse”.

Nuns in black, grey, white, beige or brown habits, in Rome to study, work or accompany pilgrims, come and go every day in St Peter’s Square, far from the media hype surrounding the cardinals.

Among them, Sister Marthe, a nun from Cameroon in her forties, said she wanted the Church to “know how” to respond to “sexual (or) power abuse”.

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REVEALED: How the People’s Pope shielded sexual predators in the clergy – including one priest accused of violently raping nuns

When the world’s cardinals met in Rome last Monday for the first of their crucial pre-conclave discussions, they raised ‘the issue of clerical abuse’, according to a Vatican spokesman. 

The cardinals are forbidden to reveal anything that was said. 

But behind closed doors, the preparations for the conclave – which starts on Wednesday – are already mired in scandal.

Aside from doubts about the true age of Philippe Ouedraogo, a cardinal from Burkina Faso whom some claim is 80, meaning he’s too old to vote, and concerns about the presence of the Peruvian cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, who faces sexual abuse allegations (which he denies), several cardinals have torn into the legacy of the late Pope Francis.

‘We have listened to many complaints against Francis’s papacy in these days’, one unnamed cardinal told America Magazine, a Jesuit publication.

In any case, we can be certain that Monday’s debate was haunted by a series of jaw-dropping scandals whose details are unknown to the vast majority of the 400,000 Catholics who attended Pope Francis’s funeral a week ago.

If they had known, the crowds would have been much smaller. 

For the common denominator of these scandals – whose victims included 20 Slovenian nuns who claim to have been raped, Argentinian seminarians grotesquely assaulted by their bishop and a Belgian teenager subjected to incestuous assault by his uncle, a bishop – is that Francis went to bizarre lengths either to conceal or excuse these crimes.

The ‘people’s Pope’ was elected in 2013 on a promise to hold the Church accountable for clerical sex abuse. 

And it’s true that he did establish new rules designed to punish bishops found guilty.

But the first Argentinian pontiff did not practise what he preached. 

The darkest mystery of Francis’s 12-year reign was his persistent habit of shielding credibly accused and even convicted sexual predators from justice. 

The Pope enjoys supreme authority over the Catholic Church. 

He can twist or ignore canon law, which is supposed to punish sex offenders, and the Vatican state’s criminal law, without being challenged.

That is precisely what he did, again and again. 

Indeed, his sinister modus operandi predated his election: as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he tried to keep a priest who abused homeless boys out of jail.

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A Frail Joe Biden Manages to Offend Multitudes During Pope’s Funeral

Joe Biden’s appearance at Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday caused as a stir as the 82-year-old former president showed significant signs of physical deterioration, even requiring significant assistance just to navigate a short flight of stairs at the Vatican.

In a telling moment that validates the concerns many of us had about his fitness for office, Biden was seen desperately clutching the arm of an elderly priest while also relying on his wife, Jill, for support. The scene would have been comical if it weren’t so concerning—here was a man who, just last year, was insisting he could handle another four years as leader of the free world, yet he can barely manage to walk down some steps without assistance.

And he wanted us to believe he was capable of serving a second term?

Make no mistake about it, this isn’t about mocking someone’s age-related challenges. This is about vindicating what conservatives have been saying for years about Biden’s declining capabilities and the Democrats’ reckless insistence on pushing him forward as their standard-bearer despite obvious red flags.

The contrast couldn’t have been more striking. While Biden struggled with basic mobility in the back rows, President Trump commanded attention from his front-row position, engaging confidently with world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky. 

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Catholic hospital drops legal argument that a fetus is not a person

Catholic Health Initiatives-Iowa has dropped its argument in a medical malpractice case that the loss of an unborn child does not equate to the death of a “person” for the purpose of calculating damage awards.

The nonprofit, tax-exempt entity is one of several defendants in a Polk County malpractice case involving the death of an unborn child.

Last month, attorneys for CHI and MercyOne Des Moines Medical Center argued an unborn child should not be considered a “patient” for purposes of calculating damages in the case. They also argued that “finding an unborn child to be a ‘person’ would lead to serious implications in other areas of the law.”

That position appeared to clash with CHI’s mission statement and ethics guidelines, both of which are based on the concept that human life begins at the moment of conception.

In Iowa, court-ordered awards for noneconomic losses stemming from medical malpractice are capped at $250,000, except in cases that entail the “loss or impairment of mind or body.” Initially, CHI and MercyOne argued the cap on damages applied in cases where the “loss” was that of a fetus or an unborn child.

However, during a court hearing on Friday, an attorney for CHI and MercyOne, Christine Conover, informed the court it was withdrawing from the motion to cap damages in the case on that basis.

“We are a Catholic hospital and obviously the Catholic faith believes that life begins at conception,” Conover told Polk County District Judge Scott J. Beattie.

“To be honest, I had wondered about that stance,” Beattie told Conover, referring to the hospital’s previously filed motion seeking to cap damages. “It seemed like kind of an odd stance,” he added, noting that it seemed to contradict the position that CHI had taken in other legal matters.

In a written statement issued Friday, Bob Ritz, president and CEO of MercyOne, stated “we are heartbroken that our belief that human personhood begins at conception would ever be called into question. As a Catholic health system, the sanctity of life is not just a belief we hold; it is the foundation of every action we take.

“While the motion (to limit damages) was accurate from a purely legal standpoint, it has caused confusion and concern. That is why we have asked our counsel to withdraw the motion with respect to MercyOne. No courtroom argument should ever cast doubt on the deeply held Catholic values that guide MercyOne.

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A Papal Biographer Shills For War With Russia

Earlier this month in The National Catholic Register, Pope John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, called Russia, “a modern Moloch, the bloodthirsty Canaanite god against whom the prophets of ancient Israel railed” – in a breathless criticism of President Trump’s Ukrainian peace efforts.

On February 12, 2025, he penned a rant syndicated by The Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. Titled Russia’s Sacrilegious War on Ukraine, the piece advocated continued war in Ukraine until Russia loses:

There is no happy or just solution to Putin’s aggression that does not end with Putin losing. How that happens is subject to debate. But Putin must lose, both for Ukraine’s sake and for Russia’s…. for America’s sake, and for the world’s.

Weigel has served on the board of the CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with Victoria Nuland. His advocacy helped save the organization in 1993, when it was almost (and should have been) shut down at the end of the Cold War.

The Trump administration has suspended funding for NED, and Elon Musk called it an “evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved.”  Arguably, more than any other Washington entity, NED is responsible for inciting civil unrest around the world to serve the purposes of corrupt people.

For over a decade, Weigel has acted as a reliable mouthpiece for NED in its efforts to cause war in Ukraine. Mostly, he has provided a Catholic pretext for awful stuff, based on a tangential association with a long-dead pope.

Whatever its initial intentions – and they were chiefly benevolent – by 2025 NED had become the driving force in a Frankenstein foreign policy that that took its initial design to its rational conclusion: chaos and death.

The details of the Ukraine conflict are rarely covered in the Western media, but they are available to piece together from open sources. In 2010, Ukraine elevated Viktor Yanukovych to president in a democratic election. As reported at the time:

A total of 3,779 observers, including 650 from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, were dispatched to monitor the election. Ukraine’s presidential election, the fifth since the country regained its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was democratic and “organized in a transparent manner,” the OSCE said today in an e-mailed statement.

In 2013, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union and, instead, entertaining a regional economic alliance with Russia. John McCain and other prominent American politicians flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU.

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The Vatican and UFOs: Is there a secret about aliens hidden in the Pope’s mysterious archives?

For centuries, the Vatican’s Secret Archive has been the subject of fascination for scholars.

They have wondered just what revelations are lying hidden in documents stored on what now consists of more than 50miles of shelves underground.

In 2020, Pope Francis opened up the files related to the papacy of the controversial Pope Pius XII, allowing researchers the chance to discover why he remained silent about the Nazi Holocaust.

But one claim that we might never know the truth of is the one made by former Pentagon official David Grusch in 2023, that Pius tipped off the US about an alien spacecraft that had crashed in Italy in the 1930s. 

He also alleged, in his interview with US cable network News Nation, that the Vatican ‘certainly’ knew about the existence of non-human intelligences on Earth. 

The claim was music to the ears of those who have long sought access to the Vatican’s archives in the hope they may contain information about UFOs.

Former UFO investigator Nick Pope, who worked for the Ministry of Defence until 2006, told MailOnline: ‘There have been persistent rumours that the Catholic Church knows some big secrets about UFOs, and that these forbidden truths might be hidden somewhere in the Vatican archives, accessible only by the Pope, a select few Cardinals, and other key personnel.’ 

Diana Walsh Pasulka, the author of 2019 bestseller American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, has previously said that the archives are ‘filled’ with records of the paranormal – so the possibility that they might too contain UFO revelations has excited many. 

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Hypocrite Pope Francis, Living Behind a 39-Ft Wall, Sends Letter to U.S. Bishops Blasting Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — Yet Imposes Harsh Penalties of 1-4 Years in Jail and Fines Up to $25,700 for Illegal Entry into Vatican

Pope Francis, who resides in the Vatican, a city-state surrounded by a formidable 39-foot wall, has penned a letter to U.S. bishops, decrying what he describes as harsh immigration policies of President Donald Trump.

In his sanctimonious letter, Pope Francis calls on the bishops to defend the “infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person” amidst what he terms a “major crisis” with “mass deportations.”

Yet, the pontiff’s selective outrage is glaring when one considers his silence during the Biden administration’s push for radical abortion policies, which directly contradicted Catholic teachings on the sanctity of life.

Read the letter below:

Dear Brothers in the Episcopate,

I am writing today to address a few words to you in these delicate moments that you are living as Pastors of the People of God who walk together in the United States of America.

1. The journey from slavery to freedom that the People of Israel traveled, as narrated in the Book of Exodus, invites us to look at the reality of our time, so clearly marked by the phenomenon of migration, as a decisive moment in history to reaffirm not only our faith in a God who is always close, incarnate, migrant and refugee, but also the infinite and transcendent dignity of every human person. [1]

2. These words with which I begin are not an artificial construct. Even a cursory examination of the Church’s social doctrine emphatically shows that Jesus Christ is the true Emmanuel (cf. Mt 1:23); he did not live apart from the difficult experience of being expelled from his own land because of an imminent risk to his life, and from the experience of having to take refuge in a society and a culture foreign to his own.

The Son of God, in becoming man, also chose to live the drama of immigration. I like to recall, among other things, the words with which Pope Pius XII began his Apostolic Constitution on the Care of Migrants, which is considered the “Magna Carta” of the Church’s thinking on migration:

“The family of Nazareth in exile, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, emigrants in Egypt and refugees there to escape the wrath of an ungodly king, are the model, the example and the consolation of emigrants and pilgrims of every age and country, of all refugees of every condition who, beset by persecution or necessity, are forced to leave their homeland, beloved family and dear friends for foreign lands.” [2]

3. Likewise, Jesus Christ, loving everyone with a universal love, educates us in the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being, without exception.

In fact, when we speak of “infinite and transcendent dignity,” we wish to emphasize that the most decisive value possessed by the human person surpasses and sustains every other juridical consideration that can be made to regulate life in society.

Thus, all the Christian faithful and people of good will are called upon to consider the legitimacy of norms and public policies in the light of the dignity of the person and his or her fundamental rights, not vice versa.

4. I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.

At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival.

That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.

5. This is not a minor issue: an authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized.

The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all — as I have affirmed on numerous occasions — welcomes, protects, promotes and integrates the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable.

This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.

6. Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.

In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation.

The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. [3]

7. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

8. I recognize your valuable efforts, dear brother bishops of the United States, as you work closely with migrants and refugees, proclaiming Jesus Christ and promoting fundamental human rights. God will richly reward all that you do for the protection and defense of those who are considered less valuable, less important or less human!

9. I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.

With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all.

10. Let us ask Our Lady of Guadalupe to protect individuals and families who live in fear or pain due to migration and/or deportation. May the “Virgen morena”, who knew how to reconcile peoples when they were at enmity, grant us all to meet again as brothers and sisters, within her embrace, and thus take a step forward in the construction of a society that is more fraternal, inclusive and respectful of the dignity of all.

Fraternally,
Francis

Border czar Tom Homan Tom Homan responded sharply to the Pope’s criticisms.

“I got harsh words for the Pope. Pope ought to fix the Catholic Church. I’m saying this as a lifelong Catholic. I was baptized Catholic. I was at first Communion as a Catholic, confirmation as a Catholic. He ought to fix the Catholic Church and concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”

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Homan Calls Pope’s Bluff, Highlights HUGE Vatican Walls

After woke Pope Francis whined about the Trump administration’s deportations of illegal alien criminals, lifelong Catholic and new border czar Tom Homan searingly exposed the hypocrisy of a man who lives behind the famed Vatican walls.

Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and those who live behind massive medieval walls shouldn’t tear down other people’s fences. On Newsmax recently, Homan pulled no punches on the subject of illegal immigration, utterly rejecting the false claim that protecting a nation‘s sovereignty is against Catholic Church doctrine (actually, heads of state have a duty to protect their people and can of course restrict immigration — see Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241). And, as a fellow lifelong Catholic, I applaud Homan for not being bullied by dishonest clerics, either in the Vatican or at home.

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt told Homan, “The Pope this week said that it’s ‘a disgrace’, what we’re now doing with this new government, deporting all of these people … there’s going to be a lot of media searching for the sad stories here, trying to turn public opinion against this operation. What’s your message to the American people, as you guys do this work?”

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More than $5 billion spent on Catholic sexual abuse allegations, new report finds

Over two decades, Catholic dioceses, eparchies and men’s religious communities spent more than $5 billion on allegations of sexual abuse of minors, according to a new report released Wednesday (Jan. 15) by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

Between 2004 and 2023, three-fourths of the $5.025 billion reported was paid to abuse victims. Seventeen percent went to pay attorneys’ fees, 6% was in support for alleged abusers and 2% went toward other costs. On average, only 16% of the costs related to the allegations was borne by insurance companies.

The CARA report combined 20 annual surveys sent to dioceses and eparchies within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (which excludes some parts of the U.S., such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa), as well as U.S. religious communities belonging to the Conference of Major Superiors of Men. The report does note that some alleged perpetrators were assigned outside the U.S. The USCCB commissioned the survey in 2004.

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