Canon Lawyer Ed Peters Weighs in on Recent Papal Statements!

“For an infant to be baptized licitly … there must be a founded
hope that the infant will be brought up in the Catholic religion."
Canon 868        

And calls the pope's comment about most sacramental marriages being null "very bad." He also says delaying the sacrament of Baptism is sometimes used by priests to assist the parents toward "improving their ecclesial situation" and that he's never known of a priest to deny the sacrament only because a mother was unwed. Our pope may talk about mercy but his unmerciful actions speak louder than his words.

The great majority of Christian marriages are valid

And then there was the pope's calling priests who delay baptism "animals."

Instruction, not insults

This pope appears to have little respect either for his spiritual sons or for the sheep. The only sheep he seems to want to smell like are those who dissent from and undermine the faith as he does himself with his constant confusing, ambiguous, and insulting comments. None of it, of course, affects the doctrine of the faith, but the continuous confusion affects the way people perceive and practice the faith. If you tell Catholics most marriages are null, how many will stick it out when things get tough in lieu of jumping ship? If you describe your priests as "rigid" implying they are all "cruel...animals" who use the confessional as a "torture chamber," how many of the faithful will respect their priests? How many laity ridiculed as "rabbits" for having large families or for offering a spiritual bouquet of rosaries, or being "Pharisees" for embracing orthodoxy will believe they are among the pope's beloved spiritual children? 

But when things are bad, that's when we need to be especially vigourous with our spiritual warfare!

Pray the rosary and go to Mass as often as possible and Confession frequently. Only a Eucharistic people committed to prayer, sacrifice, and evangelization can help to save souls from the smoky cloud of satanic confusion infiltrating Holy Mother Church. More and more I believe that the complete third secret of Fatima is the apostasy coming from the highest levels of the Church. As Cardinal Silvio Oddi said in 1990:

I would not be surprised if the Third Secret alluded to dark times for the Church: grave confusions and troubling apostasies within Catholicism itself ... If we consider the grave crisis we have lived through since the Council, the signs that this prophecy has been fulfilled do not seem to be lacking ...

And we certainly still await the peace promised by Our Lady if her requests were carried out. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.