POPE LEO XIV SCORES; WELL RECEIVED WORLDWIDE

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
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On May 8, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected by the voting Cardinals of the College of Cardinals to be the new pontiff. The Augustinian priest chose the name Pope Leo XIV.

He is the first American pope— he was born in Chicago—though he is not well known to most American Catholics. That is partly because the 69-year old spent many years as a missionary in Peru; he is a Peruvian citizen, as well as an American.

What helped him enormously with his fellow cardinals was his previous assignment as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops. In that role he advised Pope Francis on the appointment of bishops around the world; he also dealt with the resignation of bishops.

Apparently, there was not enough support for Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State under Pope Francis, to obtain the 89 votes that were necessary to win. He was the choice cardinal of the more progressive voting members. Cardinal Prevost cleared 100 votes.

Cardinal Wilton Gregory, former Archbishop of Washington, D.C. said of the future pope that it wasn’t some “convincing speech that just wowed” the cardinals. It was in small group gatherings that he impressed many of his colleagues. Also, his international experience and pastoral approach proved attractive.

It is said that New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan played a key role in advancing Cardinal Prevost’s nomination. Some say he was the “kingmaker” who elevated his status. Dolan pitched him as a “bridge builder” and a “citizen of the world.” Many look to Dolan to be the bridge between our new pope and our new president.

Pope Leo XIV will have his hands full trying to navigate Catholic waters. The Church is divided and needs someone to mend fences. Catholics are also looking for someone to bring clarity to Church teachings, especially on moral issues. The Holy Father not only commands the “bully pulpit,” he has the authority to make decisive rulings.

When he was introduced to the crowd at St. Peter’s Square, the new pope dressed in traditional papal garb, including a short red cape with a hood and a white cassock. In doing so, he reverted back to the stylistic choices of popes before Pope Francis broke ranks; he chose to wear simpler clothing.

Another sign of his more traditional approach came when Pope Leo XIV indicated that he would take up residence in the Apostolic Palace, left vacant by Pope Francis for more than 12 years. It will require renovations.

We are very happy and proud of Pope Leo XIV. We stand ready to defend him against those whose agenda is not Catholic friendly.




FIDELITY MONTH

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
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To some, June is Gay Pride Month, but to Catholics, and to traditionalists who belong to other religions, it is Fidelity Month. Bill Donohue was very pleased that he was invited to participate in this event.

Begun two years ago by Princeton Professor Robert George, Fidelity Month is a time to celebrate why we are proud to dedicate June to God, our family and our country. Working with him is Christopher Parr of The Witherspoon Institute.

George, who is a member of the Catholic League’s board of advisors, has received the support for this effort by the likes of San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone and former Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann, two stellar Church leaders.

Donohue was asked to tape a video recognizing Fidelity Month. He chose to speak to Flag Day and Father’s Day, on June 14 and 15, respectively. A veteran and a father, Donohue defended patriotism and fatherhood from its elite critics, emphasizing why both are central to American society.

Donohue pointed out that the most patriotic Americans, as revealed by survey data, are the working class and the poor. How ironic it is, he noted, that those at the top of the socio-economic scale tend to be the least patriotic. Not surprisingly, they are the same people who devalue fatherhood. It only goes to show what is being taught in the schools.

It is time to reclaim June as a month where traditional moral values are honored.




POPE LEO XIV IS NOT FRANCIS II

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
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Lots of people are wondering whether Pope Leo XIV is a reformer in the same vein as Pope Francis, or more of a traditionalist like Francis’ two predecessors. It depends on the issue, but to those who think he is a clone of Francis, they are wrong.

No sooner had Cardinal Robert Prevost been elected when some so-called progressives started celebrating what they claimed was a “woke” pope. Ironically, some right-wing firebrands were bemoaning that he is one. Neither was right—all the alarms that went off were false.

An article published on Alternet started cheering “Our New Woke Pope.” Why? Because our new pope had criticized Vice President J.D. Vance for saying love should begin with loving your family, and then spread outwards to others.

Then Cardinal Prevost said on X that “J.D. Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

It is absurd to conclude from this that the new pontiff is a “woke” pope. Vance was saying love must be set in proper order. Some Catholic theologians agree with him, and others do not. No matter, theological disputes are common in all religious circles, but standing alone they do not make anyone “woke.” This is simply a childish way to politicize matters.

Then we have far-right commentator Laura Loomer. She branded our new pope “woke” and a “Marxist.” She is badly educated.

To show how crazy those on the extreme left and right are, consider what The Nation said. It is a left-wing publication that championed Stalin, the genocidal maniac. They began raising the flag for Pope Leo XIV because they saw in him what Pope Leo XIII stood for during his pontificate.

The Nation was right to say our new pope identifies with Leo XIII, but they were wrong to say that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century pope was a social justice warrior in the left-wing tradition. They heralded him for his “sharp critiques of capitalism.” Maybe if they actually read the 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, they wouldn’t have sounded so silly.

Pope Leo XIII wrote this encyclical eight years after Marx’s death in 1883. He foresaw the horrors that Marx’s ideology would deliver. He said that “ideal equality about which they entertain pleasant dreams would be in reality the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation.” He also made the case for private property, which is hardly an expression of socialism.

Orthodox Catholics will be happy to learn that Pope Leo XIV is strongly pro-life. He is opposed to abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide. He is also pro-marriage and the family, properly understood.

He has criticized in no uncertain terms the “homosexual lifestyle” and “alternative families comprised of same-sex partners and their adopted children.” This is great news for practicing Catholics—the ones in the pews who actually pay the bills—but not for dissidents. He has also condemned gender ideology being taught in the schools of Peru. As such, he opposes the exploitation of sexually confused young people.

On immigration, Leo is much more in the liberal camp. He is opposed to the Trump policies and has even criticized the president of El Salvador for his crackdown on illegal immigration. How the heads of state are supposed to deal with those who are crashing their borders, causing misery for its citizens, is something he may have to address.

Is Pope Leo XIV a Republican, a Democrat or an independent? He’s a Republican. A registered Republican in Illinois, he pulled the GOP lever in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections. But apparently he did not vote in the 2016 general election and chose to vote by absentee ballot in 2024. It appears he is more of a Bush Republican than a Trump Republican. But he is certainly not a “woke” or “Marxist” activist.

Stylistically, Pope XIV is more measured and more traditional than Pope Francis. He is nowhere near as prolific a writer as Pope Benedict XVI, nor does he have the charisma of Saint John Paul II. But he is a thoughtful man who commands the respect of virtually everyone who has come to know him, and his missionary experience makes him a very special man. He is definitely not an ideologue.

Pope Leo XIV has expressed his gratitude to Pope Francis and will no doubt mimic parts of his legacy. But he is not going to be a rubber stamp for either progressives or traditionalists. He will carve his own legacy.

No one thought that an American cardinal would be elected the next pope. From everything we have learned, he did not lobby for this post. Maybe that’s the way the Holy Spirit works.

It looks like practicing Catholics will have in Pope Leo XIV someone they can rally around. As for the dissidents, they are by nature an unhappy bunch, so now they can look forward to more days of glum. That’s their natural step.

Congratulations to Pope Leo XIV.




PAM BONDI TARGETS MEDICAL PROFESSION

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is zeroing in on the medical profession’s role in providing services to sexually confused minors. She will focus on “the medical community’s fraud and exploitation of parents and children who have fallen prey to radical gender ideology.” She said the Department of Justice (DOJ) will not sit back and allow doctors who are “motivated by ideology, profits, or both [to] exploit and mutilate our children.”

Bondi is not making a talking point—she means business. She is putting “medical practitioners, hospitals, and clinics on notice” that they will be held accountable for engaging in sex-reassignment surgeries of children. She is also instructing her lawyers to draft legislation that will allow “children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals through chemical and surgical mutilation” to take action against them.

What motivated Bondi to act were reports that the Biden-Harris administration aided and abetted the suffering of children by the medical profession, all in the name of providing “gender affirming care.” There is nothing noble about sexually reconstructing children. It is a monstrous act done for politics or cash.

The American Medical Association (AMA) is a disgrace. The elites who run it know that sex is binary yet they pretend it is not. It is so far gone that it opposes designating sex on birth certificates as male or female, as if there is some legitimate third choice.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (APA) is just as irresponsible. It not only agrees with the AMA, it does not allow doctors to set up a booth at its annual conference challenging its flawed transgender position.

According to the medical watchdog, Do No Harm, between 2019- 2023, approximately 14,000 children underwent sex-change operations. This was supported by both the AMA and the APA.

Attorney General Bondi is right to go after the medical schools as well. Here’s a quick look at the elite ones.

Harvard Medical School houses Mass General, the oldest and largest medical school in the country. It specializes in gender-affirming care. It is so specialized that it even offers vocal feminization and masculinization services. They just don’t get it: If there is no such thing as a biological man or woman, why are they tinkering with kids’ vocal cords to make them sound like a man or a woman? Are they that ideologically drunk that they don’t see how this undercuts their position?

Boston Children’s Hospital is also affiliated with Harvard Medical School. It is the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the nation, providing “Gender Multispecialty Services” such as “menstrual suppression” and “dilation therapy and care of neovaginas.” This is really sick. They are boasting about manipulating the bodies of women to stop their normal cycle of menstruation, and they are also bragging about creating new vaginas for men who hate their bodies.

Johns Hopkins Medicine runs the Emerge Gender and Sexuality Clinic for Children, Adolescents and Young Adults. It starts playing with the bodies of individuals “between the ages of 5 and 25 years.” In other words, when Johnny is still on his tricycle, he is a prime candidate for these exploitative doctors. They even provide “penile construction” for little girls who want to become a boy.

Stanford Medicine not only makes new vaginas for the guys, it removes the ovaries from the gals. In doing so, it works “hand-inhand” with the Stanford LGBTQ+ Health Program. Did they forget the “I”? At least they didn’t forget the +, which covers them.

The Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania offers “facial feminization and facial masculinization surgeries.” Again, these savants are giving away the store—every time they say one’s sex is subjective, they offer proof that it isn’t. Do they teach logic at any of these schools? They sure don’t teach ethics.

Attorney General Pam Bondi should hold all of these predators responsible. They are preying on individuals who suffer from serious mental issues. They are not only injurious to their health, they are anti-science. Bondi should declare a mental health emergency and shut these Frankenstein facilities down ASAP.

 




JESUIT COLLEGES HAVE A FREE SPEECH PROBLEM

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release,
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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression periodically does a study of some colleges and universities, rating them on their tolerance for free speech. The 2025 report on 251 schools found that the University of Virginia ranked #1 and Harvard ranked #251.

Jesuit schools generally do poorly, and the latest study is no exception. Fordham ranked 234, Marquette was 235 and Georgetown came in at 240. Other Jesuit institutions did better: Creighton was 144, Boston College placed 189 and Loyola of Chicago ranked 209.

Other Catholic institutions of higher education did not fare very well. The University of Notre Dame placed 167, Villanova was 185, the University of Dayton registered 192, DePaul was 201, and Duquesne placed 222.

It is striking that Georgetown, year in and year out, is the least tolerant of free speech of any Catholic college or university. It is also home to two pro-abortion clubs, one at the undergraduate level and one in the law school.




NEW YORK TIMES MALIGNS IRISH NUNS AGAIN

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release,
here.

In 2013, Bill Donohue published a monograph, “Myths of the Magdalene Laundries,” that debunked the myths about the rotten living conditions in homes for unwed mothers run by Irish nuns from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

In 2014, Donohue published another monograph, “Ireland’s ‘Mass Grave’ Hysteria,” that debunked the myths about a mass grave containing the remains of nearly 800 children that were alleged to have been found outside a former home run by nuns in Tuam [pronounced Chewum] near Galway.

On May 6, 2025, the New York Times published a front-page story that repeats all the falsehoods that were previously told about the homes and the “mass grave.” Ironically, one of the persons who showed the mass grave story to be a hoax was a New York Times reporter. They really ought to read their own newspaper before publishing another story on the same subject.

Even the title of Ali Watkins’ article, “75 Years of Longing for a Child Taken From Her,” is bunk. The baby was dead on arrival. Furthermore, no one “took” the baby from Chrissie Tully—she was in a jam and had to give the baby up.

When Tully was a teenager, she got pregnant out-of-wedlock and her “family disowned her.” A priest took her to St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. As Watkins says, “for some like Ms. Tully, there was nowhere else to go.” Not exactly. There was always the street. She made the right choice.

Watkins bemoans the fact that Tully’s boy, whom she named Michael, “was taken away” from her and “never held him or saw his face.” But she went to the home because she could not care for her baby—that’s why the homes exist— and because he died at birth, she never had a chance to see him. At the time, she thought the nuns were lying, but she doggedly pursued this issue for decades, and finally obtained the hospital paperwork. It read, “Stillborn.” This settles it. She was never lied to.

Right on cue, Watkins tells readers about the homes being “one of Ireland’s enduring moral stains,” where “forced labor for young mothers, high infant mortality rates, pervasive shame and emotional abuse” occurred. The facilities, known as the “Magdalene Homes,” were established in England in 1758 and in Ireland in 1765. Similar homes existed until the 1960s.

Unlike today, where there is no shame for girls who get pregnant out-of-wedlock, there was back then. Of course, the young girls were required to work—it would have been unethical not to demand that they contribute to their livelihood. Infant mortality rates were common all over Europe during those days—the homes had no monopoly on that.

Watkins just doesn’t get it. She contends that the homes were horrid, yet she admits that Tully returned to the same Tuam home after she got pregnant again! Why would she do that? Was she a masochist? Or was she being prudent? It was obviously the latter—she admitted that the father was “not the marrying type.”

Moreover, Watkins is apparently unaware that the McAleese Report on the Magdalene Laundries, a government study published in 2013, found that the women were not abused and that the conditions were not “prison like,” as critics have contended. In fact, they were relatively good.

Regarding the mass graves hoax, Watkins writes, “In 2017, a mass unmarked grave was discovered in a septic tank at St. Mary’s, which was shut down in 1961. Within it were the bodies of at least 796 children.”

This is simply wrong. The allegation that a “mass grave” was found was first made in 2014, not three years later. That is when a “local historian,” Catherine Corless, made this claim (she is actually a typist who has no academic credentials). What Watkins is referring to is the 2017 statement on this subject made by the Mother and Baby Commission. What she failed to say is that it made no mention of a mass grave.

There never was a “mass grave.” As Donohue previously detailed, Douglas Dalby, a New York Times reporter, quoted what Barry Sweeney said (he is one of the sources who testified about what he found when he was 10 years old). “People are making out we saw a mass grave. But we can only say what we seen [sic]: maybe 15 to 20 small skeletons.”

The septic tank story is also bogus. Dr. Finbar McCormick, who teaches at the School of Geography, Archeology and Palaeoecology at Queens University in Belfast, said the so-called septic tank was “more likely to be a shaft burial vault.” He said that “Many maternal hospitals in Ireland had a communal burial place for stillborn children or those who died soon after birth. These were sometimes in a nearby graveyard but more often in a special area within the grounds of a hospital.”

It does not speak well for the New York Times to peddle such trash.




GERMAN BISHOPS DISPUTE THERE ARE TWO SEXES

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release,
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“In creating men ‘male and female,’ God gives man and woman an equal personal dignity.” That is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches. Pope Francis not only agreed with this fundamental Catholic tenet, he said that those who deny there are only two sexes, male and female, are fostering a false anthropology.

Evidently, the German bishops disagree. Indeed, they also disagree with Pope Francis’ proclamations on gender ideology, which he called “demonic.”

In a special handout prepared by the German Bishops’ Conference that was recently published, the bishops made clear their vision of humanity. Indeed, the title of their document, “Blessings for Couples Who Love Each Other,” says it all.

“Couples who love each other” obviously applies to samesex couples. Indeed, it also applies to father-daughter and mother-son couples. That may not be their intent, but this is what happens when being “inclusive” becomes an obsession.

It gets worse. The handout speaks to extending blessings to “couples in all the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities [that] are part of our society.”

This means there is a sexual orientation that extends beyond heterosexual and homosexual. The German bishops should tell us what it is. It also means there are more than two gender identities. They should name them. In both instances, it would be helpful if they provided us with pictures of these people so we know what they look like.

In all seriousness, the dissemination of this handout comes at a critical juncture in the Church’s history. We have elected a new pontiff, Pope Leo XIV, and Catholics everywhere are anxious to know what direction he wants to take us.

Will he ratify the African Catholic vision of sexuality, which emphasizes fidelity to the Church’s teachings? Or will he opt to ratify the German Catholic vision, which rejects those teachings?

There is a reason why Catholic attendance in Germany is abysmal. In a vain attempt to be “inclusive,” the bishops’ conference has unwittingly alienated orthodox Catholics, making them feel excluded. By contrast, Catholic attendance in most parts of Africa is surging, and that is due in no small way to its embrace of traditionalism.

Bishops who are prepared to believe there are a multiplicity of sexual orientations and gender identities are not only rejecting the teachings of the Catholic Church, they are rejecting what science affirms. Moreover, they are driving the faithful to exit the Catholic Church. Strike three.




MAHER MOCKS EUCHARIST

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release,
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While most people treated the news of the passing of Pope Francis with somberness and dignity, notorious Catholic-basher Bill Maher could not keep himself from making crude and irreverent comments. On the April 25 episode of “Real Time,” the bigoted HBO host used the eve of the papal funeral to insult a central tenet of the Catholic faith, the Eucharist.

Maher began talking about Pope Francis with some of the clichéd lines about priests that we have seen far too often from him. He seems to think it is the pinnacle of wit to say that “the outpouring of grief” for the pope has led to priests asking altar boys to “just hold me.”

Continuing this theme, later while Maher was trying to explain why conservatives had disagreements with Pope Francis, he ran through a litany of things that supposedly conservatives found infuriating about the late Holy Father. One thing that supposedly got the goat of conservatives, according to Maher, was Pope Francis’ “child sex ring took the focus off Hillary’s child sex ring.”

What really stood out on Maher’s list were his loutish remarks about the Eucharist. Maher went on to say that another thing that Pope Francis did to raise the ire of conservatives was that he advocated for “men eating another man’s body.” At that exact moment, on screen appeared an image of Pope Francis consecrating the Eucharist.

To take a sacrament and a core pillar of Catholicism and turn it into some sort of sick, sexualized “joke” is grotesque, but to provide such an insult at the moment 1.4 billion Catholics around the world are commemorating the death of Pope Francis is beyond the pale.

Maher is an irreverent bigot who has not been funny in years. As his star continues to diminish, he is forced to rely on mean-spirited attacks to get cheap chuckles from the handful of people who still find him interesting.




Fr. MARTIN DISTORTS TRUTH ABOUT DISSIDENT NUN

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
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Fr. James Martin, the Jesuit champion of gay and transgender rights, recently wrote a column in the New York Times that was intellectually dishonest.

He cites the case of Sister Jeannine Gramick as testimony to Pope Francis’ outreach to “L.G.B.T.Q. people.” He notes that “Her saga began in 1999, during the papacy of St. John Paul II. That year, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict XVI, barred Sister Gramick and the Rev. Robert Nugent, two Americans, from ministering to ‘homosexual persons.'” He goes on to say that Pope Francis met with Gramick and praised her for her work.

It is not clear how much Pope Francis knew about Gramick. At the time, we assumed he was given a selective interpretation of her work, which is why we accused his handlers of “manipulating” him. In any event, Fr. Martin gives the impression that Benedict is the ogre. In fact, what he did was long overdue. Here is what happened.

In 1999, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a “Notification Regarding Sister Jeannine Gramick, SSND, and Father Robert Nugent, SDS.” It was directed at the work of New Ways Ministry (NWM), which was founded by Gramick and Nugent in 1977.

Ratzinger noted that in 1984, “James Cardinal Hickey, the Archbishop of Washington, following the failure of a number of attempts at clarification, informed them [NWM] that they could no longer undertake their activities in that Archdiocese. At the same time, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and for Societies of Apostolic Life ordered them to separate themselves totally and completely from New Ways Ministry, adding that they were not to exercise any apostolate without faithfully presenting the Church’s teaching regarding the intrinsic evil of homosexual acts.”

Ratzinger then detailed the many attempts by Church officials to persuade Gramick and Nugent to abide by Church teachings on this subject. He concluded that they “are permanently prohibited from any pastoral work involving homosexual persons and are ineligible, for an undetermined period, for any office in their respective religious institutes.”

Three years later, in 2002, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote that “New Ways Ministry does not promote the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church.”

 In that same year, Archbishop Thomas Kelly of Louisville told organizers of the group’s conference that they should not celebrate the Eucharist at the NWM event. Following suit in 2007 was St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop Harry Flynn: he barred NWM’s national conference from celebrating the Eucharist.

In 2010, Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, stated that he can assure Catholics that “in no manner is the position proposed by New Ways Ministry in conformity with Catholic teaching and in no manner is this organization authorized to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church or to identify itself as a Catholic organization.”

In 2011, Cardinal Donald Wuerl of the Washington Archdiocese, and chairman of the Committee on Doctrine, joined with Oakland Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, and chairman of the bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on the Defense of Marriage, issuing an affirmation of Cardinal George’s denunciation of NWM.

For Fr. Martin not to make mention of any of this is to completely distort the record. He was also wrong not to mention that Gramick continued to defy Church teachings as late as a few years ago. On January 7, 2022, she said that in 1999 the Vatican wanted her and Nugent “to say that homosexual activity is objectively immoral and that we personally believed that. And I could not do that.”

Worse, Gramick showed more sympathy for the greatest child rapist priest in American history, Father Paul Shanley, than she did his many victims. For decades, the Boston priest raped males of all ages, and he liked to blame the victims, famously saying, “the kid is the seducer.”

In 2005, Gramick said that she “grieved for this man I had not seen in almost 20 years, but whose principles and whose advocacy for the downtrodden I had applauded for three decades.” Journalist Maureen Orth, who was married to “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert, was horrified by what she said, adding that she interviewed nine of Shanley’s victims, and that Gramick never spoke to one of them.

Pope Benedict XVI acted honorably when, as a cardinal, he called out Sr. Jeannine Gramick. To imply otherwise is scurrilous.




POPE LEO XIV IN HIS OWN WORDS

This is the article that appeared in the June 2025 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release,
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There is so much to say about a pope besides his position on contemporary public policy issues, but since the media are focused on this subject, it is important to know exactly what our new pope has said.

Abortion

  • As a student at Villanova in the 1970s, he helped found a pro-life group on campus. (The College Fix)
  • “Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel, for example abortion, homosexual lifestyle, euthanasia.” (2012 address to the Synod of Bishops, Newsweek)
  • “Let’s defend human life at all times!” (2015 tweet in support of the March for Life in Chiclayo, Peru, Newsweek)
  • “We cannot build a just society if we discard the weakest—whether the child in the womb or the elderly in their frailty—for they are both gifts from God.” (2019 homily, Newsweek)
  • “The Church must walk with all people, especially the most vulnerable, ensuring their dignity is upheld from the womb to the end of life, as this is the heart of Christ’s mission.” (2023 address to clergy in Peru, Newsweek)

AI

  • “[T]he Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” (May 10, 2025, address to the College of Cardinals, Vatican)
  • “I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity.” (May 12, 2025, address to the media, Vatican)

Assisted Suicide

  • On Twitter, he shared an article by Catholic News Agency condemning Canada for implementing assisted suicide. (2016 Twitter, Newsweek)

Euthanasia

  • “We cannot build a just society if we discard the weakest—whether the child in the womb or the elderly in their frailty—for they are both gifts from God.” (2019 homily, Newsweek)

Gender Ideology

  • “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.” (2016 to local media in Peru, National Catholic Register)

Immigration

  • On X, he shared an article from National Catholic Reporter critical of Vice President Vance’s stance on immigration. (February 3, 2025 X post, @drprevost)
  • On X, he shared an article from America Magazine critical of Vice President Vance’s stance on immigration. (February 13, 2025 X post, @drprevost)
  • In an interview with the media, his older brother John Prevost has indicated that he is “not happy with what’s going on with immigration” policy in the United States. (May 9, 2025, The Guardian)

LGBT

  • He criticized the media for portraying “alternative families composed of same-sex partners and their adopted children” in a positive light. (2012 address to the Synod of Bishops, Newsweek)
  • “Pope Francis has made it very clear that he doesn’t want people to be excluded simply on the basis of choices that they make, whether it be lifestyle, work, way to dress, or whatever. Doctrine hasn’t changed, and people haven’t said yet, you know, we’re looking for that kind of change. But we are looking to be more welcoming and more open, and to say all people are welcome in the church.” (2023 interview with Catholic News Service, National Catholic Register)
  • He has been ambiguous on Fiducia Supplicans. However, after the African bishops raised concerns about providing blessings to samesex couples, he suggested a compromise to allow the bishops to opt out. (2024, CBCPNews)

Ordaining Women

  • When asked about the possibility of ordaining women, he noted that “the apostolic tradition is something that has been spelled out very clearly.” (2023, Synod on Synodality, National Catholic Register)
  • “Something that needs to be said also is that ordaining women—and there’s been some women that have said this interestingly enough— ‘clericalizing women’ doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem,” (2023, Synod on Synodality, National Catholic Register)