After Pope Francis was backed into a corner by Bishop Schneider's respectful confrontation (God bless the bishop!), Francis went on to state in his next General Audience that God "wills to allow" the diversity of religions. This is a way of attempting to have his cake and eat it too, to have it both ways, to evade the necessity of publicly correcting his Abu Dhabi statement. How? To say that God "wills to allow" is tantamount to saying that He positively wills to permissively will. This formulation is not correct and muddies the waters. The signatories of the recent open letter accusing Francis of heresy observe correctly that the imam who signed the Abu Dhabi declaration with Francis most certainly did and does not intend to convey that God wills the diversity of religions only permissively, and this makes Francis's concession to Bishop Schneider disingenuous, since he knows this. Note that, if we restrict will to permissive will, Francis should have no trouble signing a statement asserting that "God wills the diversity of religions and the violence that breaks out among their adherents". Why would he object to this statement any more than to the one he actually did sign?

Fr. Fessio, Mr. Brumley, you are, in the final analysis, simply reiterating one of the major points that the signatories of the open letter, following many before them, make as part of the case for their accusations; namely, that Pope Francis and his representatives do NOT respond to appeals for correction and clarification (witness the dubia and the filial correction among many instances) and do NOTHING to prevent or stem the tide of scandalizing interpretations. This doubtlessly deliberate strategy is unquestionably damaging; it aids and abets heresy. I also just want to add that the charge surrounding the interfaith document, particularly the point about the intended meaning attributable to the Pope's cosignatory, seems to me to be unassailable. Furthermore, if the Pope's statement about the diversity of religions referred strictly to the permissive will of God, he could have no objection to signing a statement that read, "God wills the diversity of religions and the atrocious violence that breaks out among their adherents". With respect to God's permissive will, this is a true statement. What objection could the Pope raise to it that would not apply to the statement he signed as well?

Wow! It took me aback to find Tobin's signature under that orthodox statement from 2014. It confirms to my mind that, as I suggested in my email to him in response to his NBC interview, Tobin should and would have known better than to mislead the interviewer and that he did so deliberately. His flip-flop here certainly appears hypocritical; either that or it represents an "evolution" of his views (from Catholic to heretical). I have long seen him as a bishop with the heart and aspirations of a politician, just as you suggest, and once wrote to him that he should resign from the episcopate and the clergy and seek a career as a politician.

Amos's inference from Francis's misleading, as usual, statement is way off the mark. Francis, for his part, builds yet another straw man. In reality, no one who professes true Catholic teachings on sexuality would ever deny the inherent dignity of ANY human being, since we are ALL formed in the image and likeness of God. There is NO faithful believer who actually corresponds to the caricature of belief that Francis proposes here. We do, of course, degrade ourselves through our sins, but that does not in any way negate our inherent human dignity, derived from our very nature. It pains me to perceive that this is how Francis gaslights and allows this poor sinner to walk away from the meeting confirmed in his self-justification and his sin and to scandalize others with his self-justification. Francis's deceptions are not in his statements themselves but rather in the inferences he allows his hearers to draw from them. It seems to me that the damage that Francis inflicts on Amos and through Amos to others cries out to heaven along with all the sins related to sodomy. May God have mercy on me in drawing this conclusion and communicating it, but the conclusion appears to me to be inescapable! How can this matter rationally be construed otherwise? Let us pray for Francis and Amos and all the scandalized.

E-mail to Cardinal Tobin:

Your Eminence:

It is indescribably distressing for me as a son of the Church of Newark to watch and hear my archbishop misrepresent a critical moral teaching of the Church egregiously and embarrassingly, and I fear deliberately, to the public. You actually shockingly affirm your interviewer’s assertion that the Church teaches that people with same-sex attraction are intrinsically disordered. This rendition of what is taught is utterly false. No person can be disordered, because order is inscribed in his very nature. Only desires and actions—never persons—can be disordered, as the Catechism teaches without the least ambiguity. The difference is not hard to understand, not even for a child; and yet you did not clarify it for your interviewer and her viewers, when it was necessary and completely easy for you to do so.

You are morally obligated to issue publicly a correction of your misrepresentation and to do all in your power to insure that this correction reach the audience that received your erroneous teaching. Recognizing what is at stake in perpetuating this all-too-familiar and slanderous error, will you do this?

Sincerely in Christ,

It is a fantasy of mine that Pope Francis's selection of Archbishop Cupich as a cardinal-designate has been made in the spirit of, "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer". Cupich habitually pushes an understanding of the seamless-garment concept as not merely uniting all issues regarding the value of respect for human life and the human person, but also leveling the field among these issues, making them of equal importance. His understanding of Catholic moral teaching is confused and heretical.

The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton is not to be doubted. She selects a highly skewed sample of Pope Francis's to admire, leaving out, for example, his consistent condemnations of abortion, same-sex "unions", and gender ideology. To claim that Pope Francis is a friend of Clinton's in the sense intended here is a lie. No doubt he regards her with charity, as we all must, and no doubt there are points of contact in what each advances. And no doubt we may disagree with his judgments about when and how to confront the ways in which the liberal globalists exploit him and his words. But this post sinks to the level of propaganda.

These CNN reporters are absolutely outrageous and thoroughly hypocritical. For starters, their tone and body language are incredibly unprofessional and disrespectful of the person they are interviewing. For another, their insistence on focusing on the offensiveness of Donald Trump's behavior from 2005 dismisses and rides roughshod over their interviewee's point about its irrelevance. Perhaps most importantly, it is the media (prominently CNN) and the Clinton campaign that are responsible for the exposure of millions of children to Trumps unarguably deplorable behavior. Moreover, if it were not for their egregiously unprofessional bias in support of Clinton, they would not dismiss her references to Bill Clinton's even more deplorable behavior and would expose Hillary Clinton's disqualifying offenses, including threatening and publicly demeaning Bill Clinton's victims (bimbo-talk and so on) and her laughing at a 12-year-old victim of a rapist she defended as a lawyer and claiming as a defense that the rape was all in the victim's head. What would you call this behavior? "Court-room talk"?