Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), Pope Francis’s 2016 exhortation on love, marriage and family life, emerged from extensive consultation and two Synods of Bishops. Ten years later, Pope Leo XIV called an Assembly of families, bishops and experts in Rome to take stock. What are the takeaways? The Synthesis Report has not yet been published,…
“Contracts or memoranda of understanding covering formation, gender equality, remuneration and the administration of assets.” This is strikingly business-like language, and not what one expects to find in the headline of a Vatican press release, as was the case when the Vatican issued a report from one of the study groups running parallel to the…
We are a little less than a year away from the death of Pope Francis. Usually, distance is needed to assure perspective. It is difficult to fully appreciate a painting, for instance, when you are standing too close to it. So too, I would have thought, when writing an account of a papacy, especially one…
Last week, two of the Study Groups set up by Pope Francis following the 2023 General Assembly of the Synod on Synodality issued their final reports. One of these, Study Group 4, had been entrusted with considering the matter of priestly formation. The Church’s synodal journey has made one thing unmistakably clear: formation in general…
Last week, Pope Leo XIV proclaimed St John Henry Newman a Doctor of the Universal Church and co-patron of Catholic Education alongside St Thomas Aquinas. This marked the climax of an extraordinary week in Rome, during which Pope Leo XIV also published an Apostolic Letter entitled Drawing new maps of hope. The Letter commemorates and…
Three years ago this week, on the April 20, 2022, a group of 38 teachers, lecturers and students from various schools and colleges in Ireland left the Villa Palazzola in the Roman hills in the early hours of the morning to beat the rush-hour traffic. We had been invited to a private audience with Pope…
The controversy surrounding Eurovision 2024 led me to recall Fr Michael Paul Gallagher SJ’s commentary on St Paul’s visit to Athens. On arrival, St Paul “was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). Yet despite this, he searched for something in the Athenians’ worship of pagan deities that he…
Few theologians have ever gone out of their way to meet with the Vatican’s doctrinal watch body, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, preferring, with good reason, to give it a wide berth. That is precisely what I did, however, in my capacity as president of the 800 member European Society for Catholic…
Church, Interrupted – Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis by John Cornwell (Chronicle Prism, £21.99/€25.00) You know you are in the hands of a master author and story-teller when you open a book by John Cornwell. Readers may be familiar with his best-seller A Thief in the Night: the Death of John Paul I (1989),…
What seems like disaster can turn out to be a gift of Faith, writes Fr Eamonn Conway In 2009, I was diagnosed with a nasty form of eye cancer. Given that there was a likelihood of metastasis, my oncologist said that from now on my life would be a kind of high-wire act. He…