A laicized priest who had been the spiritual director to six people who said they experienced visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Bosnian town of Medjugorje has been excommunicated.
Tomislav Vlasic, who had been a Franciscan priest until he was laicized in 2009, was excommu-nicated on July 15 by a decree of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. The excommunication was announced by the Diocese of Brescia, Italy, where the laicized priest lives.
The Brescia diocese said that since his laicization, Vlasic “has continued to carry out apostolic activities with individuals and groups, through conferences and online; he has continued to present himself as a religious and priest of the Catholic Church, simulating the celebration of sacraments.”
The diocese said Vlasic has been the source of “serious scandal to Catholics,” by disobeying the directives of ecclesiastical authorities. When he was laicized, Vlasic was forbidden from teaching or engaging in apostolic work, and especially from teaching about Medjugorje.
He was in 2009 accused of teaching false doctrine, manipulating consciences, disobeying ecclesiastical authority, and of committing acts of sexual mis-conduct. A person who is excommunicated is prohibited from receiving the sacramentals until the penalty has been lifted.
Alleged Marian apparitions in Medjugorje have long been a subject of controversy in the Church, which have been investigated by the Church but not yet authenticated or rejected.
The alleged apparitions began on June 24, 1981, when six children in Medjugorje, a town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, began to experience phenomena which they have claimed to be apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Pope Francis warned Europe’s leaders on October 27 that the project of European unity is at risk unless they “rediscover the path of fraternity” that inspired the project’s founders.
In a letter signed on Oct. 22, the feast day of St John Paul II, and released on Oct. 27, the Pope wrote: “We can either continue to pursue the path we have taken in the past decade, yielding to the temptation to auto-nomy and thus to ever greater misunder-standing, disagreement and conflict, or we can rediscover the path of fraternity that inspired and guided the founders of modern Europe, beginning precisely with Robert Schuman.”
He made the remarks in a letter marking three milestones: the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE); the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the European Union; and the 50th anniversary of the Holy See’s presence as a Permanent Observer at the Council of Europe.
The letter was addressed to the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who had planned to travel to the Belgian capital, Brussels, on Oct. 28-30.
In the letter, the Pope noted that the cardinal intended to make “significant visits to the authorities of the European Union, the Plenary Assembly of COMECE and the authorities of the Council of Europe.”
But the Vatican announced on Oct. 27 that Parolin had cancelled the trip because of new restrictions seeking to slow the spread of the corona virus.
The Argentine Pope explained in the letter that he wanted to share his reflections on the future of Europe, a continent that he said was “so dear to me,” not only because of his family’s Italian roots, but also because of Europe’s “central role … in the history of humanity.”
He said that the pandemic had underlined the importance of cooperation between European countries and the danger of giving in to “the temptation to go it alone, seeking unilateral solutions to a problem that transcends state borders.”
The Pope made a lyrical appeal addressed directly to Europe, urging the continent not to dwell on past glories.
He said: “Sooner or later, we realize that we ourselves have changed; we find ourselves weary and listless in the present and possessed of little hope as we look to the future. Without ideals, we find ourselves weak and divided, more prone to complain and to be attracted by those who make complaint and division a style of personal, social and political life.” In his letter, the Pope called for a “healthy secularism” in Europe, where believers were free to profess their faith in public.

Pope Francis’ endorsement of same-sex civil unions will lead the Catholic faithful to convert en masse to Orthodox Christia-nity and Protestantism, a senior Russian Orthodox Church official said Thursday.
Francis became the first pontiff to voice support for same-sex couples in a documentary that premiered in Rome on Wednesday. His stance marks a departure from the Vatican doctrine office’s 2003 document opposing the “legal recognition of homosexual unions.” Roman Silantyev, the head of human rights at the Orthodox Church’s World Russian People’s Council, called Pope Francis’ comments “a strong step toward degradation.”
“People will run to the Orthodox and Protestants after that,” Silantyev told the Podyom news website. “This might cause some kind of split since many Catholics are quite conservative.”
His comments come amid Russia’s increasing embrace of conservative values, with persisting intolerance toward the LGBT community and criticism of the liberal West. A majority of Russians voted this summer in favor of constitutional changes which, in addition to allowing President Vladimir Putin to extend his rule, added language defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman to the Constitution.
Russia decriminalized homosexuality in 1993. Twenty years later, it banned “homosexual propaganda toward minors,” which activists say the authorities use to prevent them from displaying LGBT flags and holding gay pride events.

Pope Francis set the tone of his speech on October 20 by recalling the historic Assisi Meeting desired by Saint Pope John Paul II on October 27, 1986, in which for the first time in Church history the Pope invited leaders of other religions to join him in prayer for peace for the human family. That meeting, he said, contained a prophetic seed “that by God’s grace has gradually matured through unprecedented encounters, acts of peacemaking and fresh initiatives of fraternity.” He noted that since that meeting many painful events have taken place, at times in the name of religion, but that we also acknowledge the fruitful steps undertaken since then in interreligious dialogue.

A Muslim jihadi has gone on a stabbing spree in Nice’s Notre-Dame Basilica, killing the male sacristan, beheading an elderly woman at the baptismal font and knifing a fleeing third woman who died in a nearby café.
The assailant in his 20s, identifying himself as “Ibrahim,” stabbed and wounded several others around the neo-gothic Basilica of the Assumption of our Lady around 9 am on Oct. 29.
Police shot and severely wounded the killer, who was heard repeatedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” [God is greatest] as he was taken away in an ambulance.
Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamic separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. We saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. M Paty was murdered, Macron said, “because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.” The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.
That Macron even gave an anti-Islamism speech was itself a sign of how fast the debate is moving in France. Five years ago, when Fox News referred to ‘no-go zones’ in Paris, the city’s mayor threatened to sue.

More than 180,000 people have stopped identifying with the Presbyterian Church (USA) in the past four years, according to official church numbers. Now there’s one more: President Donald Trump. Trump told Religion News Service in a written interview mediated by spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain that he doesn’t consider himself to be Presbyterian. He was confirmed in the church and has called himself Presbyterian numerous times over the years. But no more. “I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian,” Trump said in the statement. “Melania and I have gotten to visit some amazing churches and meet with great faith leaders from around the world. During the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, I tuned into several virtual church services and know that millions of Americans did the same.”

On October 5, 2020, a mob of Islamic extremists attacked the homes of Coptic Christians in the Egyptian village of Dabous, located in the Upper Egypt region of Minya. According to International Christian Concern, two young Muslim adults beat up a ten-year old Coptic Christian child. Some Christian adults retaliated, triggering the attack the next day. Christians make up about 10% of Egypt’s 100 million people, making the country home to the largest Christian population in the Arab world. The vast majority of Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, the largest Church in the Oriental Orthodox communion – However there are about 350,000 Eastern Orthodox Christians, 300,000 Protestants, and just under 200,000 Catholics.

Austrian Catholic Alexander Tschugguel took Vatican police by surprise on October 24 afternoon as the “Pachamama slayer” unfurled a massive banner in St Peter’s Square asking Pope Francis for “clarity on same-sex unions.”
Tschugguel led a band of faithful Catholics from Castel Sant’Angelo — where the Catholic convert had dumped five Pachamama idols into the Tiber River during the Amazon Synod — to the Vatican in protest agai-nst the pontiff’s repudiation of Catholic teaching.
As over 50 Catholics knelt praying the Rosary in front of St Peter’s Basilica, hundreds of onlookers gathered to witness the demonstration.
A veteran Vaticanist who was at the scene told Church Militant he’d never seen anything like it before and commented how long police took to clear the protest.
“On a previous occasion when a much smaller banner was raised, police ordered it taken down in less than a minute,” he remarked. “Today, it took them over 15 minutes to bring the demonstration to a halt.”
In an interview at Castel Sant’Angelo, Church Militant asked Tschugguel why he was asking for clarity when the pontiff was on record declaring his support for gay civil unions on multiple occasions.

When I was a child growing up in a small Western Kansas town, my mom from time to time would take me to Main Street to visit the shops. Most had some version of the following sign on display, meant as a warning to be careful with the merchandise: “You break it, you bought it.”
There’s a PR corollary that could be said to go like this: “No matter who breaks it, if you don’t fix it you bought it.” It means that no matter what a leader actually says or does, if he or she allows an impression to be created and doesn’t publicly disown it, then it belongs to them.
The thought comes to mind in light of the emerging mystery surrounding the new Pope documentary “Francesco” by Evgeny Afineevsky, which debuted and already is a candidate to contain the most-dissected 20 seconds of imagery about a major world leader since the Zapruder film.
In those twenty seconds, Pope Francis makes comments about civil unions for same-sex persons that created a global media frenzy, reported as the first time a Pope explicitly had endorsed civil unions. It also appeared to directly contradict a 2003 document from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, prepared by the future Pope Benedict XVI and approved by St John Paul II, warning that such laws are “gravely unjust” and insisting that Catholics may never support them.