The topic of paedophilia inside the Catholic Church has once again become the main focus on attention, and it is important that Pope Francis has talked about “crimes” in the letter diffused yesterday, because the sexual abuse by these corrupt men is not only a sin, but a tragic betrayal of their vocation. Few days ago the report realised by the Grandy jury of Pennsylvania, which describes the abuse occurred from 1947 until today in six dioceses of the American State.

The news went around the world, but there are two details to add, which do not diminish at all the seriousness of these actions, but they permit to contextualise things better. Few have talked about it, not even the “Catho-traditionalist” media, which are exploiting this issue to spread hatred towards today’s Pontiff and his collaborators. Until yesterday, they were talking about a secularist plot; today they are «ready to ask for the resignations even only on the basis of “it is not possible that he did not know”, when some clergymen considered close to the Pontiff in charge end up in the crosshairs (only in theirs)» – wrote Andrea Tornielli. A battle not in favour of the victims but «pursued by self-styled Catholic...

Few months ago, the Italian translation of the work Luther’s Jews by German historian Thomas Kaufmann was published by the publishing house Claudiana (219 pagine, € 19,50), with a foreward by Daniele Garrone. The text makes for a remarkable shortcoming of the Italian books panorama, by describing the relationship between the father of the Reformation, religion, and the Jewish people in an exhaustive and complete way.

The thesis emerging from the study and exhaustively and convincingly argued may be summed up in an extremely simple and concise way: in the first writings Luther appears benevolent towards Jews, with the hope of their conversion; in the last writings, instead, Luther appears extremely aggressive and polemic, even with peaks of vulgarity and explicit invitations to violence, until going so far as to suggest governors persecute and expel the Jews.

The first Luther emerges with extreme clarity from the text Jesus Christ was a born a Jew (1523), written few years after the beginning of the Reformation (conventionally dated 1517). In the text Luther shows admiration and almost a sort of envy towards the Jewish people, the first interlocutor and recipient of the alliance with God, and towards the Hebrew language which contains and codifies this alliance. He made himself the spokesman for an unconditional religious tolerance towards the Jews, attitude which makes him positively stand out in his Century and in the preceeding ones. Luther’s hope is that his Reformation...

The Meeting for Friendship amongst Peoples, organised by Communion and Liberation, is about to start. Whatever one thinks, everybody should take interesti in the writings by Father Luigi Giussani. His reasonable way to explain faith does not leave indifferent, and his’ is a method of evangelisation that will never be anachronistic. It is so that he converted thousands of people, including Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Protestant theologians, agnostics, scientists, philosophers. But also several Marxists: one example is Aldo Brandirali.

Born in 1941, Brandirali was one of the points of reference for the 1968 Milanese activists, one of the exponents of the Italian Communist Party in 1945, and leader of the Maoist Union of Italian Communists (Marxists-Leninists), founder of the weekly magazine Servire il popolo [Serving the people] and the review FalceMartello [Hammer and Sickle]. At least until 1975, when, after he met Father Giussani and his 15-thousand-member party was disbanded, his path of personal conversion started.

«I had always been an influential interpreter» of the 1968 revolution, as Brandirali has recently written Brandirali. «If today I still had the opinions I had at that time, now I could only recount delusions and failures, and this would not be interesting. In fifty years I have walked,...

There are not few theorists of a secular bioethics, which denies a moral law inherent in man. The loss of absolutes is the first consequence, and the second is relativism, one of whose variant is called utilitarianism. The theorist thereof has been, for years, Peter Singer, Professor at the Princeton University, vegan, and anti-specist, having recently come back again to raise a debate.

In Italy, the most successful experiment of secular bioethics is that of the Consulta di Bioetica [Commission of Bioethics], directed by Maurizio Mori. In 2012, it appeared on all the front pages of the newspapers, as two members of the board, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, overly justified infanticide. The international indignation notwithstanding, Mori himself supported the thesis of his researchers.

But the real leader of international secular bioethics is, as already said, Peter Singer. Even he is the author of similar theses: «Neither the newborn nor a fish are persons; killing these being is not morally as negative as killing a person». «Even though the baby will be able to have a life...

«The “Our Father” is not the one of Pope Benedict XVI. God does not lead us into temptation!! Benedict XVI was fooled by the Devil». We read this on November 2007 on traditionalist websites, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio was a “simple” Argentinian Archbishop.

But, at that time, these people were an isolated voice, lacking – contrary to nowadays – the mediatic support of the religious right wind (or, better, “divine” right wing, as Camillo Langone calls it). The latter is accusing Francis of being willing to change the Pater Noster, but they ignore that the form “do not abandon us in temptation” was introduced in 2008.

It is the task of theologians – not ours – to evaluate the matter of the opportuneness or not of a better translation of the prayer taught by Jesus in the Gospels. Simply, we want to show how self-proclaimed Ratzingerians whose existential mission is the war against the Pontiff in charge – on any topic – find themselves fight even against Benedict XVI. «The Our Father will be modified and edulcorated» – has recently denounced, for example, journalist Marco Tosatti, leader of the “anti-Bergoglian resistance”. «With this effrontery, one dares to tamper with a two-thousand-year-old...

by Claudio Risé* *Jungian psychotherapist from La Verità, 08/05/18

On religiousness today as well as on who has a say or not on religious symbols and rituals, there is great confusion in Italy, also owing to misinformation. The usual stereotype, repeated more times by the big media, is that religion and its symbols do not interest almost anyone anymore. We are explained, until we get bored, that the developed world deals with other things: money, fun, status… in sum, the things that matter. The rest is bigotry about to disappear.

That is the thesis of “secularisation”. The world has by now learnt to to without God and goes on, more or less serenely, on its own. This hypothesis has been by now proposed for 230 years, when the French Revolution had the holy statues hacked down to substitute them with that of the goddess Reason, and is now refuted, as we shall see, by internationally known and accepted data. So much so that the official philosopher of postmodernity, Jürgen Habermas, asked to talk about post-secularisation today […].

The human being needs something else, beside money and more or less shiny consumes. In particular, he needs to love and to be loved by Someone else who gives him something back from a higher and eternal dimension and whom all the world’s cultures call God, in different forms. Tirelessly looking for God and his strength is the providential aspect of the human psyche which has...

  Mariano Bizzarri* *director of Systems Biology Group Lab - Sapienza University of Rome  

It is so paradoxical that the Catholic Church – in her documents and in the speeches of many of her exponents, including many Pontiffs – has always supported the compatibility between the Catholic faith and the theory of evolution, while Protestants fiercely fought evolutionism, albeit some variations depending on their multiple denominations.

In fact, the Protestant ideology – in conflicting ways – declares, on the one hand, the right to an autonomous and free interpretation of Scriptures by each faithful and, on the other, requires a strictly literal interpretation. It is exactly the literal interpretation of the Bible that led the Anglo-Saxon Protestant world into a double cul-de-sac. The literal interpretation, for the believers of one of the many Protestant denominations, means conforming their thought with a story of creation similar to a fairy tale. For non-believers, instead, the adherence to the same interpretation has fatally inspired vulgar ironies and criticism because it is so easy to show how the Biblical story of creation is scientifically untenable.

Biblical Creationism has spread among the Protestant and Evangelical demoniations, especially in the United States of America. The Catholic world, instead, is not involved in this diatribe because...

The city of Genoa (Italy) had an important role after the dissolution of the Nazi regime. From Genoa, in fact, dozens of Jews and refugees boarded to looke for a new life. However, also many Nazi criminals did; for this reason, we also talk also about ratline.

Like for every historical episode, accusations against the Catholic Church cannot fail to be levelled. In this case, she is accused of facilitating the escape also of Nazi criminals through the so-called ratline, which connected Europe with South America. This controversy has recently arisen again when Italian writer Carlo Martigli rhetorically asked Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone clarifications about all this. In particular, about Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, suspected to have supported Croatian priest Carlo Dragutin Petranovic, former army chaplain of the Ustashe militia, suspected, in his turn, to have distributed fake passports to Nazis.

Ratline: historical inquiry by Pier Luigi Guiducci

Maybe Martigli does not know it, but a historical inquiry has already been written by Pier Luigi Guiducci, Professor of History of the Church at Pontifical Lateran University. In his book Oltre la leggenda nera (Mursia 2015) – which ...

After the first attack against the Pope from his safe house, Msgr. Viganò keeps his mouth off, but he has not realised that his rifle loaded only with blanks. The last gossip of the Prelate of Varese, indeed, concerns the 2015 meeting between Pope Francis and Kim Davis, an employee convicted for having invoked the conscientious objection by refusing to sign the marriage licence of gay couples. But his reconstruction of facts was clamorously exposed by the ex spokesman of Benedict XVI and one of the closest collaborators of the Pope Emeritus: Father Federico Lombardi.

THE PREVIOUS EPISODES. Msgr. Viganò was in the public eye one week ago through a verbose dossier, well detailed but unsubstantiated, in which he asked with a great delay Pope Francis to resign, because the latter would have disregarded some alleged secret restrictions imposed by his predecessor on Card. McCarrick, accused of a past homosexual life. However, we discovered that Viganò lied: Benedict XVI himself allowed the Cardinal to disregard these restrictions, by meeting him at the Vatican and letting him attend events of other kinds (therefore, in the worst of cases, the fault would have to be ascribed to Ratzinger, unhappily involved by Viganò)....

Malcolm Muggeridge was a famous English journalist born in 1903 and died in 1990, a lover of satire and of women. He lived as a declared atheist almost until his death, that is until his surprising conversion, occurred thanks to the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, of which we celebrate the fiftieth year in these days.

He said that his look towards faith was that of a gargoyle: from the top of a spire, from the top of a cathedra, he sneered at the ridiculous behaviours and the wasted efforts by the believing humankind. But in 1969 and in 1982, around the age of 80, this contemptuous observer became Catholic together with his wife Kitty. The first spur seems to have come from Saint Teresa of Calcutta.

The journalist went to India to document the activities of the Missionary Sisters of Charity and spent much time with Mother Teresa: seeing her assist the last of the last, he then defined her a “light which could never be extinguished” and narrated his experience in his book “Something Beautiful for God”, published in 1972. He wrote about her as about a “living conversion” and said that one could not observe her with the people assisted by her, without being already in some degree converted: her love for Christ and treating everyone as if they were the Lord in person had more effect on him than anything else. While being in touch with that defender of life, Muggeridge reported to have perceived the inestimable value of the Incarnation of the Son of God.

...

“To clarify”. With this slogan the “Viganò dossier” has been thought and presented, so as to mask its real goal: induce the hated Pope Francis to resign. There is a problem: the testimony, prepared badly and in a rush, contains falsehoods above-all in its key passages, which compromise its credibility. But beside damaging above-all Benedict XVI and John Paul II, it proved to be a boomerang against Carlo Maria Viganò himself. We addressed him eight (rhetorical) questions he had better not answer, because, beside casting shadows of complicity on him, they make his accusations against Pope Francis (and against Benedict XVI) definitely collapse.

“The light eventually wins over the darkness”, said Viganò the day before yesterday to who has been discovered to be one of his proofreaders, Aldo Maria Valli. However, the “darkness” of the ex Nuncio’s past effectively compromised his dossier. We do not talk about his court cases, mentioned by us in other articles to highlight the difficulty these matters pose when Viganò asks us to trust his report devoid of proofs. Charges of misappropriation of the family inheritance arrived from his brother Lorenzo, but Viganò himself denied them by publishing a notice by other brothers of his’. Let...

The human embryo the responsible for his own development. It is an important discovery because one of the main excuses to support abortion is that the embryo would not be a human person, it would not have intrinsic capacities and its development would be totally dependent on the mother carrying him in her womb. Some call it a "clump of cells": in this case abortion would not be a morally reprehensible act.

An important study contradicts that: it is published on Nature Cell Biology and is called Self-organization of the human embryo in the absence of maternal tissues. Its authors, led by Marta N. Shahbazi from Cambridge University, showed that a fertilized egg (also called "zygote"), is an autonomous human being. They recognized «significant self-organizing properties of human embryos»: so, in fact, embryos have a life independent of that of their mother and autonomously direct their own development from the earliest moments of life.

The young embryos ("zygotes"), used in this experiment, were not manipulated or artificially forced to develop, but they grew up – on their own initiative – also in the absence of their mother's womb. Dr. Ana Maria Dumitru explained that this means that «embryos know what they’re supposed to do to live, and they try to live». This is also the reason why «most “contraceptive” drugs and...

Pope Francis did not want to comment the indictment former Nuncio Carlo Maria Viganò published against him; instead, the Pope asked the journalists to judge it for themselves. Thus, in few hours, the Editorial Staff of UCCR took seriously the memorandum by Viganò and his exhortation by the Pope and found out overwhelming evidence belying the key passage of the testimony of the already controversial ex Nuncio, so as to dismiss (or, at least, to scale down considerably) the charges.

However, before we go on, four clarifications are necessary (who is impatient can look onwards). 1) What Viganò’s accusation is: the ex nuncio did not accuse the Pope of having covered an act of paedophilia performed by Card. McCarrick; he accused him of not having listened to him when in 2013 he would have told him about the various reports/rumours on the Cardinal concerning sexual relationships with adults (seminarists) dating back to fifty years before; Viganò also says to have made Pope Francis aware of the fact that, for this reason, Benedict XVI would have «ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance». Viganò writes: although Pope Francis «learnt from me at least on June 23, 2013» about the «crimes committed by McCarrick, who abused his authority with seminarians...

Some “experts” in 10 different fields of human activities nominated 10 women each who, according to them, would have had the greatest impact of world history. The initiative was taken by the review BBC History. The first woman was Marie Curie, famous scientist who discovered – amongst the other things – radioactivity, crucial to cure cancer. At the twelfth place, surprisingly, another Mary. The mother of Christ.

A bitter surprise, not so much because Mary of Nazareth was not ranked first, but because she should have been the last. Indeed, her place was out of the ranking. In fact, no comparison is possible between the Virgin and Marie Curie, or any scientist, politician, princess, philosopher. Mary did not invent anything, but no woman has ever introduced into the world what happened through her. With her yes (“fiat”) she allowed the divine to meet the human, the infinite to reach the finite, thereby opening to men a horizon of sense and eternal life. What is the point of perfect bodily health – thanks to medical innovations – if life is then full of an absence? What is the point of recovering from a disease if reality and all what we have built or is dearest to us – sooner or later – fades into nothing, shatters in the ephemeral, as if it had never existed?

Of course, if there had been dozens of Marie Curie, the world would be undoubtedly better. The point is that we are dealing with radically...

Whilst determinist biologist E.O. Wilson believes that – sooner or later – will discover the physical basis of consciousness, others seem more realistic and admit that «there are things that cannot be proved». We refer to the famous mathematician Roger Penrose, Emeritus Professor at the Oxford University and winner of the Wolf-Prize together with his friend and collaborator Stephen Hawking.

Recently, on occasion of a conference in Milan titled Intelligenza Artificiale vs Intelligenza Naturale [“Artificial Intelligence vs Natural Intelligence”] Penrose explained in simple words why an Artificial Intelligence will never be able to exist: «The term is not exact, because none of these devices understand what it is doing. The will requires understanding, and understanding requires consciousness, that is the consciousness machines do not have». Intelligence needs consciousness.

The expression AI (Artificial Intelligence) is often used to define advanced computers or programmes playing chess. For example, it is known that a certain chess position causes problems to computers: «it is a famous position of draw known to any player mastering the rudiments of the game of chess; instead, Fritz, the main chess programme, set on the Grandmaster level, completely misunderstands the position and, after a certain number of moves, it makes a stupid mistake and loses the game. I am not a good player at all» – explained...