Ireland’s most senior Churchman has rejected calls for more decision-making power about Church teaching to be given to local bishops’ conferences. Archbishop Eamon Martin also said he struggles to envisage how the Church could lift its ban on Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics while remaining faithful to its teachings on marriage and the Eucharist.…

Cormac O’Duffy, a former teacher and graduate of UCD and UL, had his oratorio The Wedding Feast of the Lamb premiered in front of a full church at St John the Evangelist in Philadelphia during the World Meeting of Families (WMOF). The work, dedicated to marriage and family, was performed by the Choirs of Villanova…

Iraq’s most prominent bishop has called upon the synod of bishops to “feel the experience” of Christian refugees who, rather than converting to Islam when threatened with violence, have abandoned their homes and possessions.  In a homily opening the synod’s sixth day, Chaldean Catholic Patriarch Louis Raphael I Sako said “Faith, like love, is a…

Bishops need to show the Pope they are up to the challenge of leadership, writes Cathal Barry

US cardinal warns against ‘older brother syndrome’  Those who live the faith assiduously must resist temptations to feel neglected or upset by the Synod of Bishops’ emphasis on those who struggle more, according to Washington, DC’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Recalling the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the cardinal said, “Yes, there could be…

Attitudes to gay people in Africa are unlikely to change overnight, even though bishops have publicly defended the inherent dignity of people with homosexual tendencies, Accra’s Archbishop Charles Palmer-Buckle has said. Claiming that negative attitudes against homosexuals have existed for “millennia” in Africa, the Ghanaian archbishop said “it would be a bit deceptive to think”…

The Church’s refusal to allow the divorced and remarried receive the Eucharist can cause people to turn from the Church and God himself, Berlin’s Archbishop Heiner Koch has told the Synod of Bishops. In his three-minute address to the gathered bishops, Dr Koch said the Church’s theological arguments “do not silence the questions in the…