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It is most certainly not the function of the Holy See to introduce Church reforms. The first duty of the Pope is to act as primary bishop, to watch over the traditions of the Church—her dogmatic, moral and liturgical traditions.”17
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Christopher A. Ferrara (The Great Façade: The Regime of Novelty in the Catholic Church from Vatican II to the Francis Revolu)
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Offerings for charity that Catholics from throughout the world sent to the Vatican were being used to plug up deficits created by a handful of Church officials who maneuvered the bureaucratic levers of the Holy See.
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Gianluigi Nuzzi (Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis's Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican)
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The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone
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Ian Morgan Cron (Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale)
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Vatican II famously threw open the windows of the Church, seeking greater interaction with, and influence on, secular society. In Latin America a number of theologians began to work out how the teachings of Vatican II should be applied on the ground.
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Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
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When a pope dies, cardinals from all over the world collect in the Vatican and begin to meet in what they call General Congregations. In April 2005 the first few days of these meetings were spent in absorbing the implications of the death of the man the Vatican swiftly dubbed John Paul the Great. Santo Subito, the crowds in St Peter’s Square had cried: Make him a Saint Now!
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Paul Vallely (Pope Francis: Untying the Knots)
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But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. “The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded,” the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.
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The Boston Globe (Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight)
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Carafa, as Pope Paul IV, established the Index of Forbidden Books, banned all women from entering the Vatican, burnt volumes of Talmud and Kabbalah, threw the Jews of Rome into the ghetto, drained the Church’s savings while overtaxing the faithful in order to enrich his nephews and mistress, tortured and burned homosexuals in public, ordained two nephews (ages fourteen and sixteen) as cardinals, and banned the potato—recently brought to Europe from the New World by Sir Francis Drake—as a fruit of lust sent by Satan.
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Benjamin Blech (The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican)
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Catholicism’s greatest concern regarding the poor in the sixties was the issue of fertile ground that could give rise to any kind of ideology. This could detract from what the Church asked of the Second Vatican Council and has maintained ever since; to espouse the right path in responding to an absolutely inescapable demand, one that is central, such as concern from the poor, and which, in my view, appears fully formed in the bishop’s conference in Aparecida….[Yes,] there were missteps. But there were also thousands of pastors, be they priests, religious men or women, young, adult or old laypeople, who committed themselves to the Church and are the honor of our work, the source of our joy…It’s a matter of concerning oneself not with partisan politics, but with the great politics born of the commandments and the Gospel.
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Charles River Editors (Pope Francis: The Historic Life of the first Pope from the Americas)
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Dear Alessio, yes, I was an altar boy. And you? What part among the altar boys do you have? It’s easier to do now, you know: You might know that, when I was a kid, Mass was celebrated different than today. Back then, the priest faced the altar, which was next to the wall, and not the people. Then the book with which he said the Mass, the missal, was placed on the right side of the altar. But before reading of the Gospel it always had to be moved to the left side. That was my job: to carry it from right to left. It was exhausting! The book was heavy! I picked it up with all my energy but I wasn’t so strong; I picked it up once and fell down, so the priest had to help me. Some job I did! The Mass wasn’t in Italian then. The priest spoke but I didn’t understand anything. and neither did my friends. So for fun we’d do imitations of the priest, messing up the words a bit to make up weird sayings in Spanish. We had fun, and we really enjoyed serving Mass.
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Pope Francis (Dear Pope Francis: The Pope Answers Letters from Children Around the World)
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Pope Francis, who has cautioned against searching for supernatural signs, has said he sometimes prays to Saint Thérèse and “almost always” receives a rose in response.
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John Thavis (The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age)
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He set up a simple program, which he called Algo Transparency, to find out. The program entered a term, like the name of a politician, in YouTube’s search bar. Then it opened the top results. Then each recommendation for what to watch next. He ran huge batches of anonymized searches, one after another, over late 2015 and much of 2016, looking for trends. What he found alarmed him. When he searched YouTube for Pope Francis, for instance, 10 percent of the videos it displayed were conspiracies. On global warming, it was 15 percent. But the real shock came when Chaslot followed algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next, which YouTube has said accounts for most of its watch time. A staggering 85 percent of recommended videos on Pope Francis were conspiracies, asserting Francis’s “true” identity or purporting to expose Satanic plots at the Vatican. On global warming, the figure was 70 percent, usually calling it a hoax. On topics with few established conspiracies, the system seemed to conjure them up. When Chaslot searched Who is Michelle Obama, for instance, just under half of the top results and almost two thirds of watch-next recommendations claimed the First Lady was secretly a man. Surely, he thought, whatever his disagreement with his former colleagues, they would want to know about this. But when he raised concerns privately with people he knew at YouTube, the response was always the same: “If people click on this harmful content, who are we to judge?
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Max Fisher (The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World)
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Pope Francis To Open Homeless Shelter Steps From Vatican Walls
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Anonymous
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When John XXIII solemnly opened the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, he said, “The Bride of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than arm herself with the weapons of rigor.
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Pope Francis (The Name of God Is Mercy)
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You cannot be Christians without working continuously at being righteous.” — Pope Francis, during his Oct. 30 homily at daily Mass at his residence in the Vatican.
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Anonymous
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Pope Demotes U.S. Cardinal Critical of His Reform Agenda By JIM YARDLEY ROME — Pope Francis on Saturday sidelined a powerful American cardinal who has emerged as an unabashed conservative critic of the reform agenda and the leadership style that the Argentine pontiff has brought to the Roman Catholic Church. In an expected move, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke was officially removed as head of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. He was demoted to the ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.
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Anonymous
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The Vatican even today, under the popular Pope Francis, continues to prevaricate as it says that bishops should report abuse…if the law requires it. This year, the Italian bishops disclosed that they will not report clergy abuse to the authorities, because Italy does not require it. The Vatican knows full well that the law often does not require clergy to report, because its own bishops lobby to ensure it doesn’t!
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Marci A. Hamilton (God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty)
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VATICAN CITY -Pope Francis is making good on his insistence that the Catholic Church welcome all faithful-not just those who obey church teaching perfectly. He'll marry 20 couples this weekend, including some who already live together and those with children, a sin in the eyes of the church.
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Anonymous
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In addition to being dubbed the most “liberal” pontiff, Pope Francis has long been suspected of supporting exorcism. In may 2013, the pope reportedly exorcized a wheelchair bound man who was allegedly posessed by the devil. The Vatican insisted the pope “didn't intend to perform any exorcism,” and it released a statement that said “he simply intended to pray for someone who was suffering who was presented to him.
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Anonymous
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Early in 1959 he ordered the words “unbelieving” and “perfidious,” which were used with reference to Jews and Muslims, to be deleted from the Good Friday liturgy. Additional outreach followed. A pope had not met with the Archbishop of Canterbury for 400 years, ever since Elizabeth I had been excommunicated. Pope John met in the Vatican with the current Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, for approximately an hour on December 2, 1960. Then, for the first time in history, a Shinto high priest was received by a pope.
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Wyatt North (Pope John XXIII: The Good Pope)
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What those cardinals didn’t quite grasp, however, was that they weren’t just electing a CEO who would make the Vatican’s trains run on time. They were also electing Rosa’s grandson, a believer who derived from her the lesson that real faith is more about compassion than rigidity, more about seeing good in others than finding fault, and that rhetoric is hollow if not backed by action. The cardinals thought they were electing a manager, perhaps a missionary, and what they got in the bargain was the Pope of Mercy. The Francis mission was under way.
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John L. Allen Jr. (The Francis Miracle: Inside the Transformation of the Pope and the Church)
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Meerkoldreef University Tilburg, assassination Pope Francis.
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Petra Hermans (Voor een betere wereld)
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What Pope Benedict XVI failed to specify in 2013 is that the main media outlet responsible for the hijacking of the Second Vatican Council was Time magazine, which acted as the middleman between the CIA (C. D. Jackson was the intermediary employed by both institutions) and double agents like John Courtney Murray, S.J. To this day no one has explored the extent to which this realization led to Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. The one thing we know for certain is that the resignation precipitated Bergoglio’s election as pope. The connection is more than post hoc.
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E. Michael Jones (Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires?)
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Until 1970, the Oberammergau play had been given a missio canonica, an official Church blessing signaling that Church doctrine was being taught. In that year, the first production following Vatican II and its revolutionary “Declaration of the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” this blessing was withheld ... [because the play] ... was now, according to the archbishop of Munich’s pronouncement, a play that contained “anti-Semitic elements and needed revision.” The play hadn’t changed, but the Church’s message had.
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E. Michael Jones (Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires?)
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Pope Francis has publicly commended Luther and even issued a Vatican City stamp in his honor.
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Taylor R. Marshall (Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within)
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Catholic-Jewish dialogue failed because where the Catholics saw Nostra Aetate as a peace offering, the Jews saw it as a weapon in their arsenal of cultural warfare. As I pointed out in my review of Shapiro’s book: The thinly-veiled aggression behind Jewish enthusiasm for conciliar documents becomes apparent when Shapiro claims that “it was only after Oberammergau was caught between the anvil of Vatican II and the hammering criticism of Jewish groups that serious changes were grudgingly made.” The Bavarians, Shapiro seems to be telling us, were getting hammered, and they were getting hammered only because of Nostra Aetate [the document which launched Catholic-Jewish dialogue]. Without that document they could have easily deflected the Jewish blows. With it, the Jews could now play the bishop off against his flock as the best way to eviscerate the play of anything in the gospels which the Jews found repugnant.[108]
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E. Michael Jones (Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires?)
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In his autobiography Clerical Error, Kaiser explains that he left the order before ordination because he felt that he could better implement the Jesuits’ goals by working directly for the CIA as Time magazine’s Rome correspondent during the Second Vatican Council. During the soirees he hosted at his posh Rome apartment on Time’s lavish expense account, Kaiser met Malachi Martin, another Jesuit who had also become a double agent. Martin was being paid by both B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee to subvert the Catholic claim that the Jews had killed Christ.
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E. Michael Jones (Pope Francis in Context: Have the End Times Arrived in Buenos Aires?)