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Synodality and sinning against the Holy Spirit

By Nicholas Senz on Dec 08, 2022 11:05 pm
With an opaque name like “the Synod on Synodality,” even at this later stage in the process, some still wonder about the purpose of the Synod. What is the goal? Cardinal Mario Grech, head of [...]
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House passes same-sex marriage bill in final vote, sending it to Biden’s desk

By Catholic News Agency on Dec 08, 2022 11:45 am
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, following the final vote on the Respect for Marriage Act in Washington, D.C., Dec. 8, 2022. / Credit: PBS NewsHour screenshot via YouTube Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 8, 2022 / 09:45 am (CNA). The U.S... [...]
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In the Footsteps of the Holy Family: A Pilgrimage through the Virtues

By Dr. R. Jared Staudt on Dec 08, 2022 06:00 am
God has given us a portrait of the virtues in the life of the Holy Family. Unlike a static, cracked ancient stone, we find in their hearts a living icon of fidelity in hardship, stemming [...]
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The Immaculate Conception Revisited

By Dr. Leroy Huizenga on Dec 08, 2022 05:05 am
In December 2018, I wrote an article for Catholic World Report on the Immaculate Conception: “Why I came to believe that Mary was conceived without sin.” I argued that it was (1) a matter of [...]
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Stay Awake: Death, Catholicism, and Yvor Winters

By James Matthew Wilson on Dec 07, 2022 11:52 pm
The great American poet and critic Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was sometimes mistaken for a Catholic, though he himself just barely owned to being a “theist,” and he deemed even that modest statement an “unfortunate” admission. [...]
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Reaching for the heavens

By Nick Olszyk on Dec 07, 2022 08:12 pm
MPAA Rating: PG USCCB Rating: Not rated at the time of this review Reel Rating: 4 out of 5 reels In every culture that has existed, at any time in its history, God has always [...]
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Journalists contradict allegations of ‘cover up’ against John Paul II before he was pope

By Catholic News Agency on Dec 07, 2022 10:00 am
St. John Paul II, circa 1992. / L'Osservatore Romano.

CNA Newsroom, Dec 7, 2022 / 08:00 am (CNA).

Journalists investigating secular and Catholic Church sources in Poland have called into question allegations by a Dutch writer that St. John Paul II “covered up” sexual abuse while still a bishop in Poland.

On Dec. 2, Ekke Overbeek, a journalist from the Netherlands living in Poland, said he had found “concrete cases of priests abusing children in the Archdiocese of Krakow, where the future pope was archbishop. The future pope knew about it and transferred them anyway, which led to new victims.”

Overbeek referred to the case of the priest Eugeniusz Surgent and “many others” whom Karol Wojtyla allegedly “covered up.”

The Dutch publication NOS, in which Overbeek’s statements appeared, reported the journalist spent three years combing “Polish archives.”

“Almost all documents collected directly about Wojtyla have been destroyed. However, in other surviving documents, he is mentioned very often. And if you put them all together, they are pieces of a puzzle that give a picture of how he dealt with it,” the writer stated, without saying which archives he was referring to.

Polish journalists Tomasz Krzyżak and Piotr Litka of Rzeczpospolita published an investigation that countered Overbeek’s accusations, stating St. John Paul II did not cover up any abuse and consistently acted against such cases during his time as archbishop of Krakow from 1964 to 1978.

The reporters point out that the priest in question, Surgent, was not from the Archdiocese of Krakow but from the Diocese of Lubaczów.

As archbishop of Krakow, the then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla made several decisions concerning Surgent, they explained, “within his competencies, leaving the final word on possible sanctioning of the priest to his ordinary, the bishop of Lubaczów.”

The journalists added that “the then archbishop of Krakow could not do anything about the fact that Surgent was working in two other dioceses.”

The Polish reporters also referred to another incident that illustrated how Cardinal Wojtyla at the time dealt with abuse, namely the case of priest Józef Loranc, who was accused of sexually abusing young girls.

“The absence of punitive measures by the ecclesiastical court does not cancel the crime and does not undo the guilt,” Cardinal Wojtyla wrote in a 1971 letter to Loranc after he was released from prison.

For Krzyżak and Litka, “this behavior” of the later Pope John Paul II “differs considerably from the practice of leniency toward those who had committed such crimes, which was common at the time.”

In the case of Loranc, a priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow until his death in 1992, “Cardinal Wojtyla made immediate decisions in accordance with canon law. And while he gradually lifted canonical penalties and showed great mercy, he remained ever vigilant,” the journalists wrote.

When Cardinal Wojtyla learned of the case in 1970, his decision came just days after learning of the accusations against Loranc.

In a letter, the future Pope John Paul II stated that the accused priest was “suspended” and “could not exercise any priestly function” and would have to “live in the monastery for a certain period of time and make a retreat and receive help.”

The journalists said that Wojtyla “made all the necessary decisions at that moment: the quick removal of the priest from the parish, the suspension until the matter was resolved, and the obligation to live in a monastery,” where civil authorities then arrested him.

The case did not reach the Vatican, they said, because the provision directing what is now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — then the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — to deal with abuse cases was not issued until 2001. 

Although he was eventually allowed to celebrate Mass again, Loran could not return to the “canonical mission of catechesis of children and youth” or to the ministry of the confessional.

The Polish Bishops’ Conference, in a statement published Nov. 14, spoke of “increasingly hearing questions about John Paul II’s attitude toward the tragedy of sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people by the clergy and about his response to such crimes during his pontificate.” 

“It has been increasingly alleged that the pope did not deal adequately with such acts and did little to address the problem, or even covered it up,” the statement continued.

The bishops decried these as a “media assault” on St. John Paul II and his pontificate. The target of such criticisms was “his teaching expressed, for example, in encyclicals such as Redemptor hominis or Veritatis splendor, as well as in his theology of the body, which does not correspond to contemporary ideologies promoting hedonism, relativism, and moral nihilism.”

The statement was not the first time Polish Catholic leaders responded to allegations against St. John Paul II.

In December 2020, following criticism of the Polish pope in the wake of the McCarrick report, 1,700 professors at Polish universities and research institutes signed an appeal defending St. John Paul II.

The signatories included Hanna Suchocka, Poland’s first female prime minister; former foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld; physicists Andrzej Staruszkiewicz and Krzysztof Meissner; and film director Krzysztof Zanussi.

The professors’ appeal followed an intervention by Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, president of the Polish Bishops’ Conference. In a Dec. 7, 2020, statement, Gądecki deplored what he called “unprecedented attacks” on St. John Paul II. He insisted that the pope’s “highest priority” was combating clerical abuse and protecting young people.

[...]
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Extra, extra! News and views for Wednesday, December 7, 2022

By CWR Staff on Dec 07, 2022 05:00 am
Russian Accusations – “Priests arrested in Ukraine are charged with trafficking weapons used to fight Russian occupiers. But Church officials says the arrests are retaliation for Ukrainian investigation of Orthodox monasteries.” Weapons charge against priests [...]
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Books for Christmas – 2022

By George Weigel on Dec 07, 2022 03:10 am
Last month’s midterm elections made it painfully clear that many pro-life advocates and politicians are at sea in the post-Roe v. Wade environment. Shawn Carney and Steve Karlen’s What to Say When: The Complete New [...]
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To be deep in history is to cease to be Mormon: An interview with Jeremy Christiansen

By Paul Senz on Dec 06, 2022 09:38 pm
There is something remarkably engaging about conversion memoirs. Among Catholics, the conversion memoir has become a prominent book genre in its own right. This tradition goes back many centuries. Among them are Saint Augustine’s Confessions, [...]
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Conference to focus on controversial Pontifical Academy for Life book

By Carl E. Olson on Dec 06, 2022 06:38 pm
What is the doctrinal status of the Church’s teaching against contraception? How is Catholic teaching on contraception supported by Scripture, Christian anthropology, and the natural law? What is meant by the “radical paradigm change” mentioned [...]
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U.S. Catholic population shows growth, trends southward

By Catholic News Agency on Dec 06, 2022 02:00 pm
null / Goran Bogicevic/Shutterstock. Denver, Colo., Dec 6, 2022 / 12:00 pm (CNA). The Catholic population in the United States has grown by about 2 million people in 10 years. With nearly 62 million people, it continues to constitute the large... [...]
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The new times of Nicholas Black Elk, Native American and lay catechist

By Dr. Christopher Shannon on Dec 06, 2022 04:00 am
December 6th provides an occasion for Catholics in the universal Church to celebrate the life of a great fourth-century saint: St. Nicholas. Some American Catholics are also now associating the day with a different Nicholas. [...]
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You better watch out—St. Nicholas is coming to town

By Christopher B. Warner on Dec 06, 2022 03:30 am
Everyone loves jolly ol’ Saint Nicholas. There is something romantic and cozy about telling Santa stories around the crackling fire. He is an icon of the Christmas season. But not everyone agrees about the real [...]
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The serious difference between a “human being” and a “human person”

By Shaun Kenney on Dec 05, 2022 07:25 pm
When Samuel Johnson sought to reject George Berkeley’s argument that our worldly experience consisted of mental abstractions, Johnson walked to a rock and kicked it, proclaiming, “I refute it thus” as a means of proving [...]
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Speech of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Prefect to the German bishops

By CWR Staff on Dec 05, 2022 05:22 pm
Editor’s note: The following is the full text of the speech given on Nov. 18, 2022, by His Eminence Luis Francisco Cardinal Ladaria Ferrer, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to [...]
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Scientist and Saint: Blessed Niels Stensen (1638-1686)

By Dawn Beutner on Dec 05, 2022 05:00 am
For many people today, the controversy over the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo Galilei has only one lesson: faith and science are incompatible. After all, according to this argument, consider how the Church treated a [...]
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Sin, cheap grace, and John the Baptist

By Peter M.J. Stravinskas on Dec 04, 2022 11:00 am
Editor’s note: The following homily was preached on the Second Sunday of Advent (December 4, 2022), at Mount Calvary Church in Baltimore (Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter). We have completed one-fourth of our [...]
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The mighty Mississippi was once named ‘River of the Immaculate Conception.’ Here’s why

By Catholic News Agency on Dec 04, 2022 10:00 am
A bridge over the Mississippi River near St. Louis / Checubus / Shutterstock St. Louis, Mo., Dec 4, 2022 / 08:00 am (CNA). “Immaculate” is not a word most people would use to describe the Mississippi River’s famously muddy waters. But Father Ja... [...]
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Monastic decline and the loss that goes with it

By James Jeffrey on Dec 03, 2022 09:27 pm
A strange sense of beautiful abandonment accompanied me as I passed between the soundless cloisters of the Cistercian monastery Santa María la Real de Oseira in north-western Spain. One cloister was overrun with purple lavender flowers, [...]
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John the Baptist reveals the Reason for the Season

By Dr. Leroy Huizenga on Dec 03, 2022 06:00 pm
In Advent and Christmas our thoughts turn, naturally, to the baby Jesus and his Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Most people think this time of year is about the miraculous birth of Our Lord, Jesus [...]
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The unlikely hero of India: St. Francis Xavier 

By Catholic News Agency on Dec 03, 2022 06:00 am
A 17th-century Japanese depiction of St. Francis Xavier, from the Kobe City Museum collection. / Public Domain. Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 3, 2022 / 04:00 am (CNA). How far would you go to serve God? Would you be willing to travel to t... [...]
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Learning Virtue in the Postmodern Wilds

By Jack Gist on Dec 02, 2022 08:38 pm
John H. Garvey gets straight to the point in the introduction to his book, The Virtues: “The question isn’t whether colleges and universities are offering moral education, but what sort of moral education they ought [...]
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