BREAKING: Trump signs bill to reopen Social Security, Medicare opt-ins for priests, clergy

 By Tyler Arnold for EWTN News

October 21, 2026

              Image: CNA

President Donald Trump signed into law a measure that allows clergy — including Catholic priests and bishops — to opt back in to Social Security and Medicare if they had previously opted out of the program.

Under the tax code, clergy may opt out of Social Security and Medicare taxes for ministerial work but cannot receive the benefits if they do. A person who opts out typically cannot reverse that decision, but the law, supported by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), opens a two-year window for members of clergy to opt back in if they have changed their minds.

The law, signed on Oct. 20, allows clergy members to opt back in during the 2029 or 2030 tax years, but they must still meet the standard contribution requirements to receive benefits. The House of Representatives passed the bill 350-5 on April 27, and the Senate cleared it by unanimous consent on Sept. 30.

According to a news release from the House Ways and Means Committee, about 2,000 people take the opt-out. This is the third time Congress offered a temporary window for clergy to reverse their opt-outs, with the last time being 1999.

“America’s pastors and faith leaders spend their lives caring for others,” Rep. Jason Smith, R-Missouri, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement.

“Many chose to opt out of Social Security when they were young and just starting their ministry,” he said. “A single, sometimes ill-advised, decision made decades ago should not stand between them and a secure retirement.”

Support from Catholic bishops

When reached for comment, the USCCB referred EWTN News to an April 14 letter supportive of the bill, signed by Archbishop Shelton Fabre, chair of the USCCB Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, and Archbishop Ronald Hicks, chair of the USCCB Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life, and Vocations.

More: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2026/10/21/trump-signs-bill-to-reopen-ssocial-security-medicare-opt-ins-for-priests-clergy/

Canonists Warn Synod’s Canon Law Proposals Blur Lines of Church Authority

 Critics say the commission’s recommendations on lay governance, tribunals and infallibility contradict Vatican II; the nonbinding report would require Pope Leo’s approval.

EDWARD PENTIN OCT 13

Pope Leo XIV meets with members of the Circolo di San Pietro at the Vatican on Oct. 12, 2026. A Synod commission’s proposed changes to canon law, which have drawn criticism from canonists, would require papal approval to take effect. (Photo: Matteo Pernaselci / Vatican Media)

VATICAN CITY — Several canon lawyers have criticized the final report of a Synod on Synodality commission on canon law, describing several proposed changes as a departure from Catholic doctrine and contrary to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

The commission, whose report was published Sept. 30 by the General Secretariat of the Synod, sought to identify how the theological and ecclesiological insights emerging from the 2021-2024 Synod on Synodality could be translated into canonical norms.

According to Dominican priest and canonist Father Pius Pietrzyk, the commission report contains “maybe two decent ideas,” but otherwise ranges from “silly cosmetic changes to a betrayal of the Second Vatican Council and two millennia of ecclesiology.”

Legislative proposals include amendments to 34 canons, including those governing the capacity of lay people to exercise offices, responsibilities and ministries in the Church. Others relate to canons governing councils and bishops’ conferences and propose changes to participatory bodies with the aim of strengthening participation and mission.

Infallibility and the Sensus Fidelium

A key area of contention is the report’s proposal to preface canon 749 on the doctrine of papal infallibility with a reference to the sensus fidelium, or the universal consensus of the People of God.

Borrowing language from Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, the proposed addition states that “the entire body of the Christian faithful, having received the anointing from the Spirit, cannot err in matters of faith, and it manifests this characteristic through the supernatural sense of faith of the whole people when, from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful, its universal consent in matters of faith and morals is demonstrated.”

Continue reading the rest of this article at www.ncregister.com

On “cultivating an ecclesiology in which fidelity to Tradition becomes a justification for habitual resistance to the living authority of the Church.”

“St John Henry Newman understood something that seems increasingly forgotten in certain traditionalist circles: fidelity to the Church cannot be separated from communion with the successor of Peter. This does not mean that every papal judgement is correct, that every disciplinary decision is wise, or that Catholics must abandon their reason and conscience. Newman himself was far too sophisticated a theologian to believe any such thing. But there is a profound difference between questioning a pope's prudential decisions and cultivating an ecclesiology in which fidelity to Tradition becomes a justification for habitual resistance to the living authority of the Church. The papacy is not an optional feature of Catholicism, to be accepted only when its occupant meets our expectations.

“Newman reminds us that we do not remain Catholic because we trust the personal judgement of every pope. We remain Catholic because we trust Christ, who established His Church upon Peter and promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against her. The test of our fidelity to the papacy is not how readily we defend a pope with whom we agree, but whether we remain faithful when we disagree.”

- Mark Lambert @sitsio

About Roman appointments

“Every generation of Catholics discovers, often painfully, that the men who govern the Church are not always worthy of their office. Perhaps this is why Jesus chose St. Peter?

“Belloc's famous observation about the Church's astonishing capacity for mismanagement is funny because it exposes an uncomfortable truth. Given two thousand years of corruption, incompetence, scandal and betrayal, how is the Catholic Church still standing?

“Empires have risen and vanished. Institutions far better administered have disappeared. Yet the Church endures, despite the damage inflicted by those entrusted with her care. This is no defence of bad shepherds. Our Lord's warning about millstones was deadly serious. Nor does fidelity demand that we pretend every papal judgement is wise or every bishop beyond criticism. But we make a profound theological mistake when we confuse the failures of the Church's human administration with the integrity of her divine constitution.

“The Church does not endure because her leaders are good. She endures because Christ is faithful. He promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against her. He never promised that her bishops would always be impressive.

“Criticise what deserves criticism. Defend what must be defended. But never allow disappointment with the men who govern the Church to become an excuse for abandoning communion with her. Christ did not ask us to trust in the perfection of His shepherds. He asked us to remain faithful to His Church.”

Mark Lambert @sitsio 

Archbishop Cordileone: Church had greater unity under Summorum Pontificum

 

NIWA LIMBU

OCT. 8, 2026

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said the Church experienced greater unity under Summorum Pontificum than under Traditionis Custodes, warning that restrictions on the traditional liturgy risk reopening old wounds

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said the Church experienced greater unity under Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum than it does under Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes.

In an interview with French Catholic newspaper Tribune Chrétienne on October 8, the Archbishop of San Francisco said the restrictions placed on the traditional liturgy risk repeating wounds caused by the rapid liturgical changes that followed the Second Vatican Council.

“It’s very clear to me that there was more unity in the Church when we were living under Summorum Pontificum than we are now under Traditionis Custodes,” Archbishop Cordileone said.

He recalled the “liturgical wars” that followed the Council, when Catholics were judged and stereotyped according to their liturgical preferences. He said tensions continued into the 1990s before the situation began to “mellow” following the indult permitted under St John Paul II and then the publication of Summorum Pontificum.

Under Pope Benedict’s approach, Archbishop Cordileone said, Catholics attached to traditional worship and those preferring more contemporary forms could coexist peacefully without harsh judgement.

The Archbishop said Pope Benedict recognised that the Church had suffered a “profound wound” through the rupture experienced after the Council, including cases in which rapid and radical liturgical changes had damaged, and sometimes destroyed, Catholics’ faith.

Archbishop Cordileone also explained that Pope Benedict XVI’s proposal to recognise the ordinary and extraordinary forms of the Roman Rite was intended to facilitate what the former Pope called an “internal reconciliation” within the Church’s worship. His Grace said Benedict understood that genuine reconciliation could not be engineered by a committee of scholars drafting a new liturgy, but would have to develop organically through generations of Catholics worshipping according to both forms.

“It has to happen organically,” Archbishop Cordileone said. “Pope Benedict understood that this would take a long time, generations, maybe even centuries, with people worshiping with both forms of the Mass to come to a unified worship in the Church.”

His Grace said Benedict understood that the rapid changes which followed the Second Vatican Council had created a rupture that could not simply be resolved by imposing another reform from above.

“He understood the rupture that had taken place,” Archbishop Cordileone said. “He lived through it. He saw how the faith of Catholics was very seriously challenged, damaged. I’ve heard of cases even destroyed because of very quick, radical changes in the way the liturgy was carried out.”

Archbishop Cordileone warned that Catholics attached to the traditional form of worship had been “stigmatized and marginalized” within the Church, arguing that such treatment risked reopening the wounds Benedict had sought to heal.

“I think that foments division,” His Grace said. “Some people felt alienated from the Church. I fear that that might begin to happen again.”

More: https://advaticanum.com/article/archbishop-cordileone-church-had-greater-unity-under-summorum-pontificum/

“… the left is no longer the left once it has broken with the working classes.”

Guillaume Herblot  @Guigz75116

The Far Left, or the Secession of the Cultural Elites.

French geographer and essayist Christophe Guilluy put it better than anyone: the left is no longer the left once it has broken with the working classes.  

And contemporary far-left activism is not the uprising of the “people from below.” It is the pinnacle of the cultural petite bourgeoisie that has colonized the language of poverty to turn it into a marker of distinction.

The typical profile of the activist and intellectual core is not the factory worker, the suburban office clerk, or the precarious resident of the banlieues. It is predominantly white women, college-educated (bachelor’s plus three years to grandes écoles or equivalent in social sciences, education, culture), urban, hailing from Metropolia. They fancy themselves “close to the people” they claim to defend, but they are the exact sociological and cultural inverse. 

Guilluy speaks of an “almost anthropological rupture” between those who speak about the people and the people themselves. The sociology of the militants and spokespeople is very much upper-middle-class.

• The Mechanism.

Since the 1980s, the dominant left has abandoned the social question. It has replaced the alliance of teachers and workers with a bobo alliance of the metropolises and electorates from immigrant backgrounds in the neighborhoods.  

Result: the working classes of peripheral France (small towns, suburbs, rural areas) have culturally autonomized themselves. They no longer recognize themselves in the narrative produced by intellectual, media, and academic elites. The real people vote elsewhere. The far left, meanwhile, remains trapped in its progressive bubble.

• Colonization of Poverty.

That’s exactly it. We appropriate the words of oppression, domination, and “decolonization” to inject them with priorities that are those of the cultural bourgeoisie: identity issues, migration, gender, radical ecology. The working classes, by contrast, have pragmatic diagnoses (jobs, purchasing power, security, schools, migration regulation). Guilluy sums it up: bobos are “Rougon-Macquart characters dressed as hipsters.” They preserve their position, their real estate assets, the schooling of their children, all while draping themselves in virtue. They practice residential and school avoidance while demanding that others bear the consequences of their “luxury beliefs.”

• The Anthology of Contradictions.

- They defend “the people” but despise those who don’t share their codes (the “redneck,” the “racist” from the periphery).

- They talk of solidarity and diversity while living in socially and culturally homogeneous circles.

- They denounce elites while forming the new cultural elite that has captured education, culture, part of the media, and the civil service.

- They claim to fight capitalism while being the products and beneficiaries of the educational system and the metropolises that concentrate resources.

Guilluy has mapped the schism: on one side Metropolia (the big cities where the progressive cultural bourgeoisie and its electoral allies are concentrated), on the other Peripheria (the ordinary majority, everyday people, multiethnic but culturally autonomous). 

The far left is the discursive armed wing of the former against the latter. It is not a revolution. 

It is a secession of the elites masquerading as the voice of the oppressed.  

The people don’t need to be symbolically colonized. They need us to stop despising them.

BREAKING: Fr. Chad Ripperger silenced by his bishop for a year

Denver Archbishop James Golka has ordered Fr. Chad Ripperger to cease all public ministry — no talks, no preaching, no writing — for one year.

Fr. Chad RippergerYouTube/Screenshot

(LifeSiteNews) — Denver Archbishop James Golka has ordered Fr. Chad Ripperger, the most widely heard living American priest on exorcism and spiritual warfare, to cease all public ministry for one year, LifeSiteNews has confirmed directly with the priest.

The order seems to cover public appearances, online homilies, and writings. Talks already booked are to be cancelled.

Fr. Ripperger was scheduled to speak at the upcoming LifeSite 30th anniversary gala on April 24, 2027. He has notified us that he can no longer honor the engagement. “The Archbishop has asked me to take a break on public speaking,” he wrote. When asked to do a video address or something in writing, he also declined noting that questions on the restriction should be directed to the Archbishop of Denver. Moreover, he noted that the restrictions would be in place for a year – till next September. LifeSite has also learned he has cancelled speaking engagements with at least two other organizations.

LifeSiteNews has contacted the Archdiocese of Denver seeking comment on the nature, reasons, duration, and any Vatican involvement. So far the archdiocese has declined to comment.

Golka, named bishop of Colorado Springs by Pope Francis in 2021 and archbishop of Denver by Pope Leo XIV in February 2026, now holds faculties over Ripperger and the Society of the Most Sorrowful Mother (Doloran Fathers), the public association Archbishop Samuel Aquila received into the archdiocese. There has been no public decree explaining the penalty, no announced finding of heresy.

The silencing follows the largest public exposure any priest has likely ever had with Fr. Ripperger’s recent appearances on the mega talk-shows of Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Sean Ryan.

On April 3, 2026, Ripperger sat with Tucker Carlson for nearly two hours to discuss possession, the occult, politicians and the demonic, addiction, and communism as a psychological twin of diabolic method. The full episode on Tucker’s YouTube channel got more than 3 million views and nearly 94,000 likes. Short clips continue to add millions more.

He went twice to the Shawn Ryan Show, among the top podcasts on Spotify. Episode #285 (March 5, 2026), a four-hour conversation on the mark of the beast and the rise of the Antichrist, has been reported in the 2.5 to 4.1 million view range on YouTube. The July 23 return visit, episode #324, sits around 2.7 million views; a single clip from that hour has passed 640,000. Combined with Spotify audio, the Ryan appearances alone put Ripperger in front of millions of listeners who did not come looking for a diocesan chancery statement.

More: https://x.com/lifesite/status/2112234027746766903?s=46&t=IydJ-X8H6c0NM044nYKQ0w