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Pontifications

A fascinating in-house SSPX interview with Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the schismatic right-wing order, shows he was taken by suprise by Benedict’s sudden lifting of the excommunications. Why? As Reuters’ Tom Heneghan has it in this FaithWorld post, Fellay says (translation from the French) that relations with Rome had been “rather cold” for months.…

That is certainly my sense of Benedict’s address at the Vatican this morning to U.S. Jewish leaders. The meeting was the latest and probably last high-profile effort to soothe Jewish-Catholic relations in the wake of the pontiff’s outreach to the schismatic Traditionalists of the SSPX, including the Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson. The text is here,…

The official text, delivered in English, today: Dear Friends, I am pleased to welcome all of you today, and I thank Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Mr Alan Solow for the greetings they have addressed to me on your behalf. I well recall the various occasions, during my visit to the United States last year, when…

In this story Reuters’ Vaticanista Phil Pullella has the lowdown ahead of Thursday’s critical meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and American Jewish leaders. Read transcripts of Pullella’s interviews with leading members of the Jewish delegation, and see a timeline on Catholic-Jewish relations. The long and short of it: Jewish leaders say the problem is bigger…

Today is also the date, in 1858, that the Virgin Mary first appeared to Bernadette Soubirous in a grotto in Lourdes, in southwest France. During subsequent apparitions, Our Lady of Lourdes–as she came to be known–revealed various messages to Bernadette, and thus began one of the greatest stories of Marian devotion and pilgrimage in church…

“All I want is a small corner of the earth where I am master,” Pope Pius IX said in 1871, when the reunification of Italy had finally overwhelmed church resistance and the Papal States were no more. And a small corner is all he got–108 walled-in acres on the far side of the Tiber, the…

Last week I linked to a story from the LA CityBeat paper that was making the rounds indicating that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was engaged in an awful-sounding legal strategy to deny a possible abuse victim recourse to the courts. The victim, “John TH Doe” in court papers, was reportedly in Iraq when the…

That’s the question I was asking as I tried to parse the latest blog posting from Bishop Richard Williamson, the un-excommunicated SSPX bishop who has become the focus of p.r. efforts by both the Vatican and his own confreres, who are distancing themselves from Williamson and his Holocaust-denying views. Me, I’m beginning to warm to…

SSPX leaders are continuing to quarantine the Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard Williamson. The Italian daily La Repubblica reports today that Williamson has been removed from the seminary in La Reja, outside Buenos Aries, which he had headed since 2003. What next?

In an important and I would think necessary step toward healing the Catholic-Jewish rift over the papal outreach to the SSPX, Benedict XVI is reportedly to meet next Thursday with leaders of the major Jewish organizations. A meeting with the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, which had broken off relations over the disputed gesture to anti-Semitic…
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