Pope francis

When will Catholic LGBT activists wake up to the fact Pope Francis doesn't particularly like them? He thinks the Church should go a bit easier on them, and — as he made clear last year — that they should enjoy the legal protection of gay civil unions. But, as the Vatican yesterday reaffirmed, official Catholic teaching won't be changing. There will be no church blessings of homosexual unions, because they're not part of God's plan. Progressive media is wailing like a Sicilian widow at the news. In issuing its latest decree, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is 'dashing the hopes of gay Catholics who believed Pope Francis might have created a more open environment'. No it isn't.

Last month, the Vatican and the Chinese Communist party announced the renewal of a two-year agreement on the appointment of bishops in China. Under the deal in 2018, the Catholic Church lifted the excommunication of bishops hand-picked by the atheist CCP and formally recognized them. Besides interfering in such appointments, Beijing subjects Chinese Catholic congregations to state regulation and the reeducation of what it considers insubordinate priests. These methods are evidence of the party’s efforts to cull Catholicism of the traditions, doctrines, and practices that have defined the faith for millennia.  Anyone who prizes religious freedom worldwide should be disturbed. Why is Beijing so hostile toward those looking to practice their faith according to their conscience?

On Tuesday the Vatican published its long-delayed report on the subject of ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the insatiable sexual predator who served as archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006 but continued to wield huge influence in the Catholic Church until 2018, when he was finally exposed by the media and forced to resign as a cardinal.Less than a week later, it’s becoming clear that the document is a laborious but clumsy whitewash. Let me explain why.The ostensible purpose of the 500-page report was to explain how McCarrick rose to high episcopal office despite the fact that his beach-house assaults on seminarians were common knowledge among US bishops and Vatican officials for decades. And this it succeeded in doing, more or less.

Last week we learned that Pope Francis has torn up the Catholic Church’s teaching that same-sex civil partnerships are gravely immoral. This week he will be rooting for the pro-abortion candidate in the US presidential election. These two surreal developments are causing distress bordering on spiritual despair to conservative American Catholics. Whether you feel any sympathy for them depends on your point of view. The Pope, it is safe to say, is unlikely to lose any sleep over the matter. Francis dislikes the United States in general and its president in particular. That’s not surprising; so do most Argentinians. What is surprising is the depth of his contempt for conservative American Catholics.

Why did Pope Francis refuse to meet Secretary Pompeo in Rome this week? The obvious answer is that he didn’t want to confront the diabolical consequences of renewing the Vatican’s 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist party. These go beyond the harassment of loyal Chinese Catholics who now find themselves forced by the Pope to recognize party stooges as their own bishops. We’ve never seen the text of the Vatican-Beijing pact, and we won’t be informed about the terms of its renewal, but it’s clear that somehow President Xi has also secured Francis’s silence on China’s genocidal campaign against the Uighurs.

By now, it’s clear to most American Catholics that our Holy Father just doesn’t like us. While most laypeople assumed his ‘rigidity’ slur was aimed at the legions of young people who are returning to the Latin Mass. Nope: most bishops know he’s talking about the Yanks. He calls the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’s conservative majority, like the saintly and learned Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, right-wing ideologues. His senior advisers accuse Catholic conservatives of engaging in an ‘ecumenism of hate’ with Evangelical Protestants. Sure: Pope Francis cottoned to a few bishops.

Pope Francis stands accused this morning of covering up the crimes of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, one of the most senior and sinister sex abusers in the history of the Catholic Church. The allegation comes from the Vatican’s former apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 77, who has called on the Pope to resign. In a devastating 11-page written testament, Viganò says Francis lifted severe sanctions imposed on McCarrick for sexual wrongdoing by Pope Benedict XVI, the existence of which has not been made public until now.