Pope francis

It turns out Francis is Catholic after all

The CCP hopes that if it can control a people’s language, it can control how they think

It would take hours to list the evasions, half-truths and omissions in the report

Ever since Francis started lobbing missiles at doctrinal conservatives, the latter have been asking ‘is the Pope Catholic?’

We’ve never seen the text of the Vatican-Beijing pact

As conservatives, the US bishops’ instinct is to take the Pope’s slights on the chin. But in the last year, they’ve begun pushing back

The allegation by a former senior Vatican diplomat that Pope Francis vigorously covered up sex abuse is looking more credible by the day. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, says he told Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, retired Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser of seminarians. The Pope ignored him, he claims – and lifted sanctions placed by Benedict XVI on McCarrick. Moreover, he fully rehabilitated the old man, who became one of his most trusted advisers. Viganò has called on Francis to resign. We can now be reasonably certain that Benedict, after a deplorable delay, did punish McCarrick, whom independent sources have confirmed was forced out

A Pennsylvania grand jury report released last night has revealed that the Catholic Church in six dioceses systematically and sneakily covered up sexual abuse by priests on a horrifying scale. The American Church has now been plunged into the worst crisis in its history. The 884-report comes less than a month after the revelation that ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington DC, was a compulsive predator. His serial molestation of seminarians was an open secret, and cannot possibly have come as a surprise to some of his friends in the American hierarchy. The grand jury report – which examined only a tiny fraction of America’s nearly 200 dioceses – has set off an explosion of rage

There was never going to be a happy ending to the story of Alfie Evans, the 23-month-old boy treated at Alder Hey hospital, Liverpool, for an undiagnosed neurological condition that destroyed his brain. But somehow the British establishment has contrived to make a tragic situation worse – to the point where large swathes of European and American public opinion are convinced that this terminally ill child and his parents have been the victims of a grotesque injustice. Whether that is the case will remain a matter of opinion: the medical and ethical questions raised by Alfie’s plight are not easily resolved. Alder Hey’s specialists were quite certain that there was