For those with ears to hear, every so often it’s actually possible to detect the sound of history’s tectonic plates as they shift. Such was the case Thursday, with a remarkable gesture by Pope Francis of inscribing a group of Coptic Christian martyrs into the Roman Martyrology, Catholicism’s official compendium of saints. The move was…
Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, president of the powerful Italian bishops’ conference, comes off as a very modern figure. His roots are in the Community of Sant’Egidio, a new movement in Catholicism that dates just to 1968, and he’s a key ally of Pope Francis in his effort to promote a 21st century global Church. Yet…
With Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva back in power in Brazil, the acronym ‘BRICS’ is once again in fashion in international affairs. It refers to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, with Lula’s vision being that these emerging economic and political superpowers could form a partnership to offset the predominance of the West. This…
On any other day, the dominant Vatican headline on March 29 would have belonged to German Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner, whose unexpected resignation from the Pope’s chief advisory body on combating sexual abuse left the broader state of Francis’s reform campaign an open question. It wasn’t just the fact that Fr Zollner resigned which raised…
When the US bishops elected a centre-right prelate and protégé of an influential conservative Italian cardinal as their president last November, it was framed in much reporting and commentary as a protest vote against Pope Francis. ‘Bishops elect anti-Francis archbishop as president,’ was how the National Catholic Reporter headlined an editorial blasting the choice of Archbishop Timothy…
Three leaders of NATO member states – and, as it happens, three Roman Catholic laity deeply involved in politics – all issued stirring defences of Ukraine this week, as the one-year anniversary of its war with Russia approached. US President Joe Biden delivered a forceful speech in Warsaw February 21 in which he vowed that…
In the summer of 1971, no question before the US Supreme Court was as contentious as the Pentagon Papers case, in which the Nixon administration sought to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing a classified report on the Vietnam War. In a 6-3 decision, the court eventually upheld the right…
Even in the purest democracies, it’s a myth that elections are determined by the people. In reality, they’re determined by the people who actually vote – which, in the recent midterms in the US, was about 47% of those eligible to cast a ballot. Of course, the Catholic Church is not a democracy. Pope Francis,…
While news agencies and Catholic social media denizens these days gorge themselves on the Vatican’s mounting “Battle of the Books,” seeing who can craft the most sensational headlines or tweets about several controversial new volumes making the rounds, other outfits are, thankfully, still concerned with things that actually matter. Such is the case, for instance,…
To judge by sensationalist newspaper headlines and breathless social media posts, one might assume that the open conflict in Catholicism unleashed by the death of Pope Benedict XVI and fanned by a series of tell-all revelations from his longtime aide, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, would be the talk of the town in Rome — which, after…