Well! What an exciting week it’s been! All the Catholic bloggy world is in a froth over the Dubia of the Four Cardinals and the pope’s non-response. It has taken me the best part of a week to complete this because events kept changing so fast I couldn’t keep up. But it seems we are in another little lull.

Francis is thought to have refused to meet with his own cardinals at the consistory this weekend in order to avoid being confronted personally in a venue where it would be impossible to avoid answering the question whether he is or is not a Catholic. A pope hiding from his own cardinals in order to avoid being called out on heresy – oh, sorry, on “errors” – is something I’m not sure the Catholic Church has ever seen in all her long and strange history.

For the past three-and-a-half years we have witnessed the bizarre, completely unprecedented spectacle of a wayward Roman Pontiff engaged in clever maneuvering to impose upon the Church a disastrous fracturing of her bimillenial moral and Eucharistic discipline respecting the divorced and “remarried”—and, even worse, via Amoris Laetitia (especially Ch. 8, ¶¶ 300-305), a form of situation ethics that would institutionalize admission to the sacraments of all manner of people living habitually in situations that are mortally sinful.

"We are now the remnant of the Church. We have no leadership worth the name. We cannot go where they are going, since they are going to perdition. As awful, as unbearable as it seems, we have only that one duty left; to carry on, by ourselves if necessary." - Hilary White

You may have heard that we were struck again with big earthquakes late last month. I think there was something about it in the news before your election. I’m currently writing from a train in northern Italy where I’ve more or less been wandering the countryside looking for a new place to live while they figure out whether my house in Norcia is going to keep standing up. Things are a little strange at the moment, but I think no stranger than they are in the life of the Church in general. At the moment, my personal life closely resembles the larger situation of uncertainty, turmoil and upheaval, so it is hard to complain of an opportunity to suffer exactly as Christ is now suffering in His Mystical Body.

Nice Pantsuit, Hillary! (She's with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards whose daughter, by the way, is a high operative in Clinton's presidential campaign.)

Desperate times demand desperate measures, which is why Father throws caution to the wind and argues that Catholics can never in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton. In one of the most courageous sermons preached in years, Father lays it all on the line and helps Catholics understand exactly what Church teaching allows and forbids when it come to next week's election